It is May 2020 and I am reading about Beria. I am reading Ryszard Kapuściński’s Imperium. For about 10 months in 2003-2004 I lived in Krakow, Poland. When I left for good, I bought a slim paperback in the Warsaw airport, just to have something to read on the plane. It was Kapuściński’s Another Day of Life. The book is his account of three months of the Angolan Civil War in 1975, which he was reporting on for the Polish Press Agency.

Portugal experienced a revolution in 1974 which overthrew the Salazar dictatorship. The new leaders had no interest in pursuing the Portuguese colonial project, and so an exodus began. Kapuściński reports that the Portuguese inhabitants of Luanda were convinced that they would be slaughtered wholesale when the independence movements fighting one another in the south of the country reached them in the capital. The bill for hundreds of years of colonial occupation coming due, so to speak. He describes how the city of Luanda gets a sibling, a “wooden city” of shipping crates filling every street and sidewalk. The old city is moved into the wooden city, and the wooden city is moved onto ships headed for Portugal. This despite the fact that many of these Angolan-born Portuguese people have never been to their “home” country to which they are now retreating.

Kapuściński himself heads south, to the front. This is his general approach: when all the (white) people are fleeing a situation, he heads towards it. There is something of Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo journalism in his approach, minus the drugs and self-indulgence. Another Day of Life is also fascinating as a depiction of a Cold War proxy conflict: the two opposing factions in the civil war, the FNLA and MPLA, are backed by America (aided by apartheid South Africa) and the Soviet Union (aided by Cuba). Kapuściński, as a Polish journalist, is more welcome among the MPLA. Upon being stopped on the road by yet another band of armed men, he is relieved to recognize among them (from their accented Spanish) advisors from the Cuban special forces.

In Imperium, Kapuściński turns his reporting to home. Well, sort of his home. The basic point of the book is that when we think of colonialism, we tend to think of the British Empire and those of other western European countries (and the US), but the Russian imperial project is at least as significant. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early ‘90s, it’s clear that the Imperium is at either an end or a major inflection point. As in Angola, in Honduras, in Ethiopia, he wants to see the country while the transition is fresh, and so he travels to key locations in Russia and its former vassal states.

But for the first entry he didn’t have to travel anywhere. The Imperium came to him when he was 7 years old, when the Red Army invaded Poland in 1939. Kapuściński relates his childlike impressions as deportations of neighbors and friends (eventually, his elementary school teacher) begin. As the famine begins. His mother gives all the available food to her children, taking nothing for herself, but must leave the kitchen for these meals. She is doing the right thing for her kids but, as she is starving herself, it is too much to watch them eat. It’s almost too fitting that his hometown of Pińsk, where this took place, is currently not Poland but Belorussia– the kind of capricious post-colonial border jockeying he would’ve recognized from Africa.

But those deportations, the topic of obsessive discussion among the schoolchildren, some of whom have even snuck out to the railroad tracks and watched the dejected people being offloaded from wagons and stuffed into train cars “using knees and rifle butts so that there would be no room left even for a pin.” These Poles are being deported to collective farms faraway locations like the Caucasus, where they will face poverty and hunger separated from everything they have ever known. Or to a worse fate in forced labor camps like the gold mine in Kolyma, Siberia.

Who is directing these deportations? Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD in 1939. Beria didn’t begin Stalin’s great purge and may have even prosecuted it with slightly more restraint than his predecessor, but the human toll of all the interrogation beatings, gulag deportations, and outright executions he oversaw is still vast. He has Garanin, an equally murderous overseer of the Kolyma labor camp, executed “for obscure reasons.” He organized the Katyn massacre of Polish officialdom. Beria dances throughout Imperium, as Kapuściński encounters evidence of his handiwork and that of the NKVD on his travels.

But the situation which Kapuściński describes in the most detail is one in which Beria is a victim. He relates the story told in a book he refers to as Beria: The End of the Career ¹. In 1953 Stalin had been dead for four months, and his successor Khrushchev worried that Beria would kill him and seize power himself. So he assembled a posse which cornered Beria at a meeting of the Political Bureau. He may not even have been planning his own coup: Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who physically arrested Beria, said that in the moment he “was pale, very pale. And stunned.” They snuck him out of the Kremlin wrapped in a carpet to hide the arrest from his staff.

It is May 2020 and I am making short songs with bass and drum programming. The Menegroth extended family had been entertaining ourselves making purposefully moronic death metal, but among the setups in the joke band is one I think has real potential. I can write the songs, program the drums, record the bass, and add samples/special effects/whatever. Get it that far along. Send these short, intense bursts of bass and machine drums to Colin. Colin can handle the guitar (and ultimately engineer/mix the album). Send the instrumentals to Paulo, Paulo’s vocal approach is perfect. It’s a complete circuit. I am making these short songs with bass and fake drums and I can’t stop thinking about Ryszard Kapuściński, traveling to Kolyma by train while reading a book about Beria.NEXT