Word: kapuscinski
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...reporter YURI ZARAKHOVICH followed Yeltsin around the country while Washington correspondent JAMES CARNEY, returning to his old posting in Russia, tracked Zyuganov. Back in Moscow, correspondent SALLY DONNELLY and stringer CONSTANCE RICHARDS filed background reports, picture editor MARK RYKOFF directed a team of 10 photographers and Polish journalist RYSZARD KAPUSCINSKI, a longtime Soviet watcher, returned to a much changed Moscow to take the city's pulse. Coordinating operations was Moscow bureau chief JOHN KOHAN, who drew on eight years' experience in Russia to write an essay about whether democracy will ever be possible there...
...dustbin of history overfloweth in Ryszard Kapuscinski's Imperium (Knopf; 332 pages; $24). After journeying 40,000 miles through the crumbling Soviet + Union between 1989 and 1991, the Polish journalist leaves the gloomy impression that debris is piling up faster than it can be removed. The windows of his railroad car frame pictures of rusted tanks and artillery sinking in the mud. From the air, polluted lakes stare back like the cloudy eyes of dead fish. At the Yerevan airport, Kapuscinski finds four broken toilets and hundreds of travelers awaiting flights for days and sometimes weeks...
...Kapuscinski is a writer who can make a point. A best-selling author in Poland, he is widely known in the rest of Europe and in America for The Soccer War, a collection of daredevil reportage from the Third World. Imperium too is a bravura performance, a kind of New Journalism about the Old World. As a youth in Soviet-dominated Pinsk, Poland, which is now in Belarus, Kapuscinski saw friends and teachers disappear -- part of Stalin's mass deportation and resettlement program that aimed to replace diverse nationalities with homo sovietus. This misfortune, as a dour professor in Baku...
Imperium is a dramatic and often droll history of damage and resentments both small and large. "Don't walk along this path," a wary guide tells Kapuscinski. "because you are not a Georgian. The Georgians will not forgive you." He also hears of nearly 40 border conflicts, none more bitter than the clash between Muslim Azerbaijan and the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Geographically separated from Armenia, the Christian majority of Nagorno- Karabakh sees itself as a forgotten outpost of Western civilization in a rising sea of born-again Muslims. Armenians and Azerbaijanis are so polarized by this issue, says Kapuscinski...
...this and other encounters with transition in the defunct empire, Kapuscinski gets to the irrational heart of nationalism, racism and religious fundamentalism. In Imperium, those who know their history can't wait to repeat...