Imperium Summary

Kapuściński’s book Imperium details his experience in Soviet Russia during the height of Stalinism, after the Berlin Wall fell, and after the fall of the Soviet Union in its entirety. Kapuściński was a Polish journalist who was seven when he first experienced the wrath of the Soviet Union, an experience that colors how Kapuściński sees the Soviet Union later on in this book and his life. The word ‘imperium’ that is found several times throughout this book and is the title is defined by Kapuściński to be mean the Soviet Union itself; his view of the Soviet Union is that it is one of the most horrific regimes in human history because it exploited many diverse cultures of people who were prone to bowing to overbearing regimes and found themselves
capable of living in fear. It is through these biases against the Soviet Union that Kapuściński tell the rest of the world, who knew little about what the Soviet Union was like, his experiences with the Soviet Union. Kapuściński is not an objective observer; he cannot claim that he writes about being in the Soviet Union in a manner that is completely without personal opinion. This is because of his experiences with the Soviet Union that he had as a child.
When Kapuściński was seven years old, there was an outbreak of war in Poland, more specifically the second world war. Kapuściński describes the horrors of living in a Polish town under Soviet occupation through the eyes of a seven-year-old. He describes how his mother lived in constant fear and how he and his sister slept in their clothes with their shoes and coats close by so that if the red army came for them in the night, they would be ready. Kapuściński details how his classmates slowly disappear as entire families are deported, a word that the young Kapuściński did not understand when he first heard it, he only understood the inflection of the adult’s voices when they said it and from that he knew no good meaning could be attached to the word. From these description that Kapuściński gives the reader, it is easy to tell that he has not had good experiences with the Soviet Union and their Communist machine. This let the reader know that this book is a biased account of the Soviet Union, but that is not necessarily a terrible thing. In fact, it could be argued that for a regime such as the Soviet Union, a person who was disenchanted with its ideals and was of strong enough mind to buck against the ruling power would be an
ideal person to write about the Soviet Union. He is not a foreigner enchanted by the ideals of communism, who views everything as interesting, or a foreigner who views everything that has to do with the Soviet Union as evil and abhorrent, despite having no previous experience with it. Nor is he a citizen of one of the Soviet countries who has had their mind and body broken by the tyrannical regime of the Soviet Union who does not know how to formulate any kind of question. Instead he has the will to ask questions and while he never opposes the Soviet government decidedly, he simply writes down what he experiences, good or bad. His biases give him a will to oppose the Soviet government best way he can and that way is to experience the Soviet Union through his travels and tell of those experiences as honestly as he can as he experiences it because what would hurt an already lame Soviet Union the most is an honest depiction of what life is like under the regime. For Kapuściński, the worst and most inhumane parts of the Soviet Union regime was the mass murder and the air of oppression and fear. There is an air of death everywhere in the Soviet Union because the regime has murdered a great deal of people. Former Gulag cities are the worst, as all the people who were sent there were sent there to die. Vorkuta is an example of one such city. Kapuściński describes the city as “a place of martyrdom” because hundreds of thousands of people were sent there to die, so many that it is unclear how many perished (p. 158). Vorkuta is still a place of death despite the gulag closing in 1959, as the mines that have taken over the town cause so much death. Kapuściński describes a railroad that was built by the people who were imprisoned at the gulag in Vorkuta as having mass graves besides it from all the people who perished building it. Death is very real and very present in the Soviet Union because mass murders are part of the industrial machine itself. Departing from the gulags, people in the Soviet Union also faced great famines, especially the Ukrainian famine caused by collective farming in the 1930s. It is easy to why people in the Soviet Union had such short life spans. The oppression and fear that the people faced was intense, as the Soviet Union felt determined to homogenize all the distinct cultures within its grasp into something that was purely communist. In doing so, the Soviet regime instilled fear into all of those who would try and differ from the norm. Despite this, Kapuściński found that the majority of cultures in central Asia were at least partially intact, showing that the Soviet Union was most concerned with its European holdings. Kapuściński also mentions that he fears three evils for the future of what once was the Soviet Union: religious fundamentalism, racism, and nationalism. The Soviet Union strove to eliminate all religion, race, and nationality, so it only makes sense to him that these things would follow liberation. The central nature of the Soviet Union for Kapuściński is death. From his point of view, The Soviet Union created a society that would never evolve and could not create. This, not even mentioning the mass death of humans, is a living death. The Soviet Union taught people to never question anything, to be content with what you are given, and to become one with each other in a sense that destroys singular and cultural identity. The Soviet Union became a machine of death killing people, culture, and society indiscriminately, only to replace everything with stagnation. Overall, this book it an interesting and unique look into the last dying breathes of the Soviet Union. Kapuściński uses his own biases to show what the Soviet Union was like for him and how he experienced it.