A risky undercover reporting trip along Russia’s great mother–river, the Volga, reveals the tortuous history and frightening current fantasies of a nation.

Since the invasion of Ukraine and ban on foreign reporters, Russia seems to have sunk into an even deeper shadow than in the darkest times of the Soviet Union. Posing as an historian, Italian journalist Marzio G. Mian managed to explore today’s great clash of civilizations—between Russia and the West—by traveling the floodplains where the Orthodox faith first took root, the Soviet empire asserted itself, and the neo–imperial project of Vladimir Putin’s post–Soviet autocracy is currently being consolidated.

In encounters with contemporary Russian intellectuals, entrepreneurs, priests, widows, mercenaries, and pacifists, Mian discovers how little we know about Russia and Russians. His perilous journey reveals a people deeply distrustful of democracy, nostalgic for Stalin, yearning for the ideological and spiritual purity of the Orthodox Church, betrayed by and fearful of the West, and reassured by the brutal, fragile, ancient dream of an imperial civilization.

About the Author: 

Marzio G. Mian is an award–winning journalist affiliated with the Pulitzer Center. The author of five Italian books, he lives in Milan.

Elettra Pauletto is a writer and a translator of French and Italian. She lives in Lenox, Massachusetts.