Monday, Oct. 10, 1994

The Debris Is Piling Up

By R.Z. Sheppard

The 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 tells the author, threatens present-day peace and stability from the Caucasus to the Pacific. "Now," he says, "one cannot move anyone without also moving someone else, without doing him injury."

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, that anyone who is bold enough to suggest a mediated solution to his own leaders risks ostracism and even death.

In 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 it.