Winner of the Estense Prize

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. Only by presenting himself as an historian was Italian journalist Marzio G. Mian able to penetrate the Russian heartland, leading to his groundbreaking cover story for Harpers’ Magazine, “Behind the New Iron Curtain.”

In Volga Blues, Russian history and literature inform every step of Mian’s revealing and perilous journey along Russia’s most culturally significant river, the fulcrum of its history, “the mother.” Along with Alessandro Cosmelli, his photographer; Vlad, their translator and fixer; and Katya, Vlad‘s girlfriend, Mian manages to gather firsthand accounts from ordinary Russians. They discuss not only the impact of the war, Western sanctions, and their country’s isolation, but how Russian culture has changed as a result. Stalin is back in favor, Lenin has been downgraded as a “Europeanized intellectual.” Newly sophisticated local and seasonal cuisine is all the rage. People cite centuries-old grievances to explain their fear of Western invasion, as they claim a willingness to accept nuclear apocalypse to save Russian pride. Talking with contemporary Russian intellectuals, entrepreneurs, priests, widows, mercenaries, and pacifists, Mian discovers how little the West knows about Russia and Russians. Deeply distrustful of democracy, 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, they make clear that the Cold War has not yet ended.

In visceral prose, Mian takes us across the floodplains where the Russian Orthodox faith first took root, where the Soviet empire asserted itself, and where the neo-imperial project of Vladimir Putin’s post-Soviet autocracy is currently being consolidated. The result is a harrowing, haunting vision of today’s great clash of civilizations—between Russia and the West—including a United States that at times seems uncannily similar.

"Volga Blues blends history, myth, and comedy with the paranoia of a nation in which Stalin seems to be rising from the dead, minus the communism but with brutality intact. Marzio Mian is Alexis de Tocqueville in what has once again become a land of the czars, a Joan Didion for the new authoritarianism's absurdity and sorrow."—Jeff Sharlet, New York Times bestselling author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War