A remarkable and moving history of the Soviet Union told through the people who lived through it. 'The most passionate, engaging and historically profound account of the Soviet empire that I have read' Michael Ignatieff Imperium is the story of an empire: the constellation of states that was submerged under a single identity for most of the twentieth century - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. From the arrival of Soviet troops into his hometown in Poland in 1939, to just before the Berlin Wall came down, as the USSR convulsed and died, Kapuscinski travelled thousands of miles and talked to hundreds of ordinary Soviet people about their extraordinary lives and the terror from which they were emerging. It is a classic of reportage and a literary masterwork by one of the great writers and witnesses of the twentieth century. 'Enchanting... A triumphant combination of bleak history and black comedy' The New York Times Book Review 'When our children's children want to study the cruelties of the late twentieth century...when they wonder why revolution after revolution betrayed its promises through greed, fear and confusion, they should read Ryszard Kapuscinski' Wall Street Journal