Among the Russians

by Colin Thubron

First published 1983

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4.3(292)

Travelling alone by car in 1982, Colin Thubron crosses the western Soviet Union from the Baltic republics and Russia toward Georgia and Armenia. He builds the journey from encounters in cities, villages, homes and public spaces, recording shortages, suspicion and bureaucracy alongside hospitality, religious memory and the persistence of local identities beneath official Soviet culture.

The journey belongs to the late Brezhnev period, when the Soviet system still appeared durable but economic stagnation and private disillusionment were increasingly visible. Thubron moves between imperial and revolutionary history and the texture of contemporary life, showing how Russians, Balts, Georgians and Armenians understood themselves inside a state that claimed to have created a common Soviet identity.