On a rainy day in June 2017, Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, traveled to a remote monastery in the Valdai Hills, some 220 miles northwest of Moscow. He had come to consecrate the source of the Volga River. From a wooden platform, Kirill read a blessing, swung an incense-laden censer, and kneeled, dipping a golden orthodox cross in the headwaters of what he called “the great Russian river.”
The Volga is not Russia’s longest river (though it is Europe’s). But as the religious pomp suggests, it is by far the country’s most significant. “Russia would not exist without the Volga,” Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, tells Marzio Mian, an Italian journalist and the author of Volga Blues: A Journey Into the Heart of Russia. “It’s the life force of a nation. Symbol and destiny. It’s the autobiography of a people.”
Volga Blues is Mian’s chronicle of a monthlong, mostly landbound journey he took down the entire 2,000-mile river in the summer of 2023. To travel freely, without the restrictions usually placed on foreign journalists, he presented himself as a historian gathering material about the Volga, accompanied by a photojournalist using a tourist’s camera and two Russian translator-fixers. In reality, Mian asked his subjects about their lives, Russia, and the war in Ukraine, going as far as he dared without arousing too much suspicion. He quotes their conversations at length and changes many of their names for security reasons.
As a result, the book brims with rare, candid, and colorful glimpses of Russia and its people during a period of immense repression, secrecy, and violence. That was the summer of the Wagner Group rebellion, when Yevgeny Prigozhin marched his private army toward Moscow, only to call the mutiny off a day later. “[A]ny attempts to create internal turmoil are doomed to failure,” Vladimir Putin said in a speech afterward, making a charged reference to smuta, a period of severe political crisis in the early 17th century that continues to summon dread in Russia today.
Putin spoke of a “tremendous coming together of society” in the aftermath of Prigozhin’s would-be smuta. Mian’s book presents a different sketch of Russia. Not of a society coming apart, but of one that is much more chaotic, diverse, and often incoherent than either Kremlin news conferences or Western headlines would have us believe.
Consider the story of the sausage oligarch, Ivan Kazankov. A gas station attendant points Mian and his team to Kazankov’s sovkhoz in the Mari El Republic, along the Volga’s northern bank. Mian assumes the worker is using the Soviet-era term for a state-owned collective farm anachronistically. But Kazankov’s meat-processing plan is, at first glance, a fully functional sovkhoz, complete with Soviet flags, a Stalin statue, and portraits of employees who had won productivity awards: best sausage stuffer, best tractor driver, best agronomist.
It turns out that the farm, which identifies as a “Communist-Stalinist enterprise,” was established in 1995, four years after communism fell, during Russia’s wild transition to a market economy. It’s a family-owned megafarm, not a state-owned co-op, although it has all the dressings of an “idyllic Communist past,” Mian writes. Kazankov feeds his profits back to his workers’ wages and eats in the same cafeteria as them, albeit at a private table behind a curtain. “What matters is that it runs as before,” he explains, a heyday before the neoliberal disaster of the 1990s, when the economy tanked, casting workers into poverty and unemployment, and society into chaos and violence.
The privatized sovkhoz model is reassuring and stable, if incoherent. Kazankov welcomes Mian into an office seemingly decorated “with the express purpose of disorienting anyone hoping to understand contemporary Russia.” It is a hodgepodge of Russian iconography: a bust of Stalin here, a portrait of Nicholas II there, and a picture of Putin next to a saint.
Many of the people Mian meets along his journey embody a similarly scrambled worldview. Mikhail S., a philologist who tours Mian around the city of Tver, calls it Russia’s “rough and incoherent soup of identity.” Ingredients with clashing flavors make it into the pot: Stalinism, nationalism, monarchism, Christianity, imperialism.
The transhistorical idea of “Russia,” broadly defined, is the obvious link between Stalin and the tsars. It’s a sort of Russkiy mir cinematic universe, to borrow Putin’s term for an expansionist Russian world. Some characters don’t make the cast; Vladimir Lenin is one. In his hometown of Ulyanovsk, renamed for his family name Ulyanov, Lenin is an “unmentionable,” says Dimitri Rusin, an academic and tour guide. Lenin’s childhood home draws far fewer tourists now than several decades ago. His likeness is conspicuously absent from tchotchkes and apparel, whereas Stalin T-shirts are all the rage with the Russian youth. One teenage girl whom Mian and company encounter on a boat ride in Yaroslavl changes into hers to elicit a reaction from the Westerners.
A Russian Orthodox priest baptizes a child in the Volga River in Volgograd, Russia, on April 1, 1999.Antoine GYORI/Sygma via Getty Images
