From Revolution and Lenin to Stalin’s Terror, from the Great Patriotic War to Gorbachev, The Shortest History of the Soviet Union is a vivid account of the life and death of a unique empire, written by one of the world’s foremost experts. This is a masterpiece of history writing – essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this century as well as the last.

In February 1959, a group of nine experienced hikers in the Russian Ural Mountains died mysteriously on an elevation known as Dead Mountain. Eerie aspects of the mountain climbing incident - unexplained violent injuries, signs that they cut open and fled the tent without proper clothing or shoes, a strange final photograph taken by one of the hikers, and elevated levels of radiation found on some of their clothes - have led to decades of speculation over the true stories and what really happened.

Imperium is the story of an empire: the constellation of states that was submerged under a single identity for most of the twentieth century - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. From the arrival of Soviet troops into his hometown in Poland in 1939, to just before the Berlin Wall came down, as the USSR convulsed and died, Kapuscinski travelled thousands of miles and talked to hundreds of ordinary Soviet people about their extraordinary lives and the terror from which they were emerging. It is a classic of reportage and a literary masterwork by one of the great writers and witnesses of the twentieth century.