Road To Volgograd

Invited by the writers Union to spend a month in the Soviet Union in 1963, the author spent time in Moscow, Volgograd (which had recently changed it's name from Stalingrad), Leningrad (previously Saint Petersburg, then Petrograd, and now of course, Saint Petersburg again), Irkutsk and Lake Baikal, Bratsk, and a return to Moscow.

The book is arranged loosely as a chapter per city, and for me it got a bit bogged down in politics and the war at the start. The chapter on St Petersburg didn't appeal as much as had expected, as I loved it as city when I visited, but the chapters on Irkutsk and Lake Baikal, and Bratsk were the highlights for me.

His travel culminates in Moscow, at the May Day / Bolshevik spring festival which Fidel Casto attended. Cuban flags joined Soviet flags and Red Square was filled with marchers, bands, troops and tanks.

3 stars, it was a bit slow in places and for me a lot of references to Soviet historical figures and writers contemporary to the time were lost on me, as I am the first to admit I am unfamiliar will all but the most obvious in only a most vague way.

Some of the descriptive writing was good: P93
Lake Baikal is hemmed in from the sea by fold upon fold of land: it is fifteen hundred miles from the nearest salt water. No other lake in the world is that far inland, so deep, so cossetted by the earth. The mountains have put loving arms around it, feed it with water from three hundred and thirty rivers, each drop of which stays five hundred years in the lake before sliding out by the single exit of the Angara.