"Seen from the West, Russia today is a distant, mysterious, hostile land. Since the invasion of Ukraine it seems to have sunk into an even deeper darkness than in the darkest times of the Soviet Union, like a planet in itself, a sinister world made distant and inaccessible by war. Defying the paranoid controls of the security services, Marzio G. Mian managed to travel six thousand kilometers into the belly, heart and soul of Russia, choosing the main route of its history: the Volga, the Russian river; in a land of rivers, the one called "matuskha," or "mommy." It is the river that serves as totem and autobiography of the Russian people. On its banks, the Orthodox faith took root after the fall of Constantinople, the Tsarist empire arose, the Soviet empire asserted itself, with the battle of Stalingrad and Stalins forced industrialization. There too the neo-imperial project of Vladimir Putins post-Soviet autocracy was consolidated. "Homeland" of the Tatars, the Cossacks, the holy monks, the shamans, of Razin, Pugachev, Lenin, Kerensky, Goncharov, Pushkin, Gorky, Khlebnikov, of archaic and rural Russia, of metropolitan Russia and of great spaces full of nothingness, of the steppes and the sovkhoz, of the factories and the izbas, of the most reactionary tradition and the most ruthless revolution, the Volga is the river where Europe and Asia meet or divide, depending on whether the compass of Russian history points to the East or the West.

Traveling from north to south, from its source in the Valdai region (between St. Petersburg and Moscow), to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea, without ever meeting a foreigner, without hearing any language other than Russian, Mian reveals a people made up of many nations and held together by the brutal, fragile, ancient dream of an imperial civilization. Literary journalism of the highest order, Volga Blues is born out of Mians defining cover story for Harper Magazines, "Behind the New Iron Curtain." Funded by the Pullitzer Prize Center on Crisis Reporting, Mians journalism excavates the true heart of modern Russia through the voices of intellectuals, entrepreneurs, priests, widows, mercenaries, and pacifists. In his dangerous month-long journey along the Volga, far from the familiar journalistic territory of Moscow and St. Petersburg, he reports on the governments reactionary Eurasist thinking, nostalgia for the Soviet period and Stalinism, as well as the rebirth of God, the ideological and spiritual centrality of the Orthodox Church and the reappearance of Old Believers, the most radical religious ideology in the anti-Western offensive. This gripping tale of a perilous journey into Putins Russia during the war in Ukraine, Volga Blues offers a much deeper understanding of who Russians have been and who they are today"-- Provided by publisher.