When Joe Luc Barnes arrived in Moscow in 2014 as an English ‘governor’ to a six-year-old oligarch’s son, he expected Tolstoy-style dachas and polite tea. Instead, he found flashing blue lights, Champagne Sundays and an 85% approval rating for Vladimir Putin.

Eight years, 60,000 miles and one full-scale invasion later, Barnes set out to discover how every former Soviet republic – from war-scarred Ukraine to tech-hungry Estonia, oil-rich Kazakhstan to the torch-lit streets of Armenia – has fared since the red flag fell in 1991. How have the fifteen countries navigated their first thirty-five years of independence? 

Travelling by rattling platzkart train, hitch-hiking and riding in the exclusively white cars mandated by the dentist dictator in Turkmenistan, he gathers a chorus of voices: taxi-drivers nursing small-town resentments, ex-gulag guards, TikTok-fuelled activists, queers on the run from police raids and billion-dollar oligarchs who still swear by Stalin. Barnes is in Moscow when Putin invades Ukraine and ends his journey in war-torn Kiev. The result is a deeply human, darkly comic 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. 

By turns hilarious, angry and heart-stopping, this is an indispensable political travelogue. If you loved The Silk Roads, Nothing to Envy or The Places in Between, and have a soft spot for Bill Bryson, clear space on your shelf: this is the book for you.