Farewell to Russia - Joe Luc Barnes, at Heffers Bookshop

Snow, concrete, the KGB: that’s the cliché of the Soviet Union. But its collapse in 1991 sparked a story at once messier and more compelling than any stereotype. Thirty-five years on, Moscow may brim with champagne bars and blacked-out Mercedes – but what became of the other fourteen states that emerged from the ashes?

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Joe Luc Barnes crossed the former USSR to find out, from the gleaming towers of Azerbaijan to the former gulags of Kazakhstan, tech-hungry Estonia to the minarets of Uzbekistan. Along the way, he finds epic mountains, cobblestoned old towns and storied Silk Road cities – not to mention Georgian wine, Armenian brandy and vodka in industrial supply.

Travelling thousands of miles, he gathers a chorus of voices: nomads in mountain yurts, TikTok-fuelled activists, small-town taxi drivers and many who still look uneasily over their shoulder for the secret police. With insight, empathy and a healthy dose of mordant wit, he asks what has happened – and why – to the people and their hopes and dreams since the great promise of independence.

By turns hilarious, angry and heart-stopping, this is a darkly comic, deeply human portrait of a region the West still misunderstands – and a warning of what happens when empires break but the habits of empire refuse to die.

JOE LUC BARNES has spent a decade living and working as a journalist across China and the former Soviet Union. Joe’s fascination with the region began with his love of Russian literature. Before long, he was living it, working as a governor in a dacha outside Moscow. He later studied a master’s in Russian and East European Politics at Oxford University.

As a journalist, Joe has contributed to numerous English language media outlets including The Financial Times; Nikkei; The Diplomat; and The Times of Central Asia. In an age of work-from-home punditry, he prefers the messiness of the road: the haze of smoky bars, chance encounters in a railway dining car. He has visited all fifteen former USSR republics since the war in Ukraine began in February 2022. He is currently based between London and Central Asia.

Chris Aslan was born in Turkey and was raised there and in war-torn Beirut. After school, he spent two years at sea, and then lived in Central Asia for 15 years. First, was Khiva, a desert oasis in Uzbekistan, where Chris established a UNESCO workshop reviving fifteenth century carpet designs and embroideries, and becoming the largest non-government employer in town. He was deported as part of an anti-Western purge, and took a year in Cambridge to write A Carpet Ride to Khiva. Chris then spent several years in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan, training yak herders to comb their yaks for their cashmere-like down. Next came a couple more years in Kyrgyzstan living in the world’s largest natural walnut wood and establishing a wood-carving workshop. Since then, Chris has studied and rowed at Oxford and now divides his time between lecturing for the Arts Society, writing fiction and non-fiction in his mountainous home overlooking the sea in North Cyprus (where he is overrun by cats) and returning to Central Asia to lead tours whenever he can, having left a large chunk of his heart there. His latest book is Unravelling the Silk Road.

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