Red Odyssey: A journey through the Soviet Republics

London: Secker & Warburg , 1992. Hardcover. Fair/very good. Travelling at first by car and, when that disintegrates, by any means at hand, the author - an adventurous, irreverant Muscovite - reveals a Soviet Union few Western travellers have ever seen; a country on the edge of civil war, where ethnic tensions are leading increasingly to violence and gangs of young thugs terrorise outsiders like himself. As he travels - through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenia and Azerbaijan - he visits new towns and old haunts, friends and family, and poets, artists and scholars who have become politicians in the newly politicised nation. The result is a book rich in history, full of marvellous anecdotes, a compelling portrait of an empire on the edge of disintegration. Size, 24 x 155cm, 431 pages, 1 map. Ex-library, front endpaper removed, some library markings. Black cloth boards in very good pictorial dust jacket. Internally, Fair-to-Good: pages yellowing slightly, but overall are clean and unmarked in sound bindings.