Down the Volga: A Journey Through Mother Russia in a Time of Troubles - Hardcover

A Canadian journalist (White Tribe Dreaming, 1988) with a strong knowledge of Russian history travels down the 2,000-mile Volga River. ``Mother and mistress, comrade and beloved, companion and teller of tall tales,'' the Volga is to Russia what the Mississippi is to the US and the Nile is to Egypt. De Villiers once worked as a foreign correspondent in Moscow; recently, when a small group of Russian journalists there told him of their plan to journey down the Volga, he jumped at the chance to join them. His adventures take him into the heartland of the country as he travels to such towns as Uglich, where the tragedy of Boris Godunov began in 1591; to Balakhna, where Peter the Great built many of his ships; to Gorky, where Sakharov was exiled; and to Ulyanovsk, where Lenin was born. Much has changed since the last time (perhaps ten years ago) that de Villiers visited Russia: Now, his movements are only nominally monitored and there is much freedom of expression as everyone he meets--from judges to peasants--talks of Gorbachev, glasnost, perestroika, and the future. ``People were coming to work bleary-eyed not from alcohol but from an overdose of politics,'' he writes. ``The whole country was on a politics binge, endlessly jabbering, endlessly arguing....'' Much, however, has stayed the same: It's still extraordinarily difficult to track down a person's telephone number or to get a seat in a restaurant. At times, especially when describing the machinations of his trip, de Villiers is a bit lengthy, but for the most part his smooth, well-written prose moves along at a rapid clip. A rich and deeply sympathetic look into parts of Mother Russia rarely visited by tourists. (Maps.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

An air of melancholy, of wrenching wistfulness informs Toronto journalist de Villiers's account of his circuitous rambles on Matushka Volga , "little Mother Volga which is Russia itself," during the summer of 1990. Although he has a knack for making certain unpleasant experiences seem like a lark, this is a serious-minded, probing, knowledgeable report on heartland Russia today, also on many yesterdays ago as the author relates tales going back to the Huns and Tartars, plus more recent history, to the Cossacks, the Revolution, WW II. Alternately traveling alone, with tourists on a Russian cruise ship, in the company of five Soviet journalists from Moscow--not an especially compatible crew--on a creaky vessel which looked like a decommissioned military craft, de Villiers was intrepid. The Russian-speaking journalist visited villages for which he had no visa and hung around factories, collective farms, the riverfront, the streets: chatting, questioning, listening. He discerned widespread nostalgia for a noble dream corrupted, then abandoned, and found racism and ethnic anger "everywhere," pessimism "everywhere." It was a dispiriting 3500 kilometers.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.