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
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