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Eastward to Tartary

Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus

Part of Vintage Departures

Author Robert D. Kaplan
Paperback
$16.95 US
Knopf | Vintage
On sale Oct 23, 2001 | 384 Pages | 978-0-375-70576-2
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  • Humanities & Social Sciences > Interdisciplinary Studies > Race and Ethnic Studies > Middle East History
  • Humanities & Social Sciences > Interdisciplinary Studies > Race and Ethnic Studies > Russian and Eastern European Studies
  • Humanities & Social Sciences > Political Science > Comparative Politics > Russian Politics
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  • About
  • Excerpt
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Kaplan takes us on a spellbinding journey into the heart of a volatile region, stretching from Hungary and Romania to the far shores of the oil-rich Caspian Sea. Through dramatic stories of unforgettable characters, Kaplan illuminates the tragic history of this unstable area that he describes as the new fault line between East and West. He ventures from Turkey, Syria, and Israel to the turbulent countries of the Caucasus, from the newly rich city of Baku to the deserts of Turkmenistan and the killing fields of Armenia. The result is must reading for anyone concerned about the state of our world in the decades to come.

“Erudite and intrepid... [Kaplan] is a deft guide to wherever he chooses to lead you.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Packed with provocative insights.”—Washington Monthly

“A graceful writer... Providing historical (and cultural and religious) context is what Kaplan does best.”—Los Angeles Times
1

RUDOLF FISCHER, COSMOPOLITAN

The scent of plum brandy and red wine mixed with the mildew and dust from old books and maps. It was ten in the morning, February 17, 1998. I was in an apartment in the drab eastern outskirts of Budapest. My host, Rudolf Fischer, suggested that we start drinking. "The slivovitz is kosher—look at the Hebrew label! And the wine is young—from a barrel in Villá¡nyi, in southern Hungary. It will rest easy in your stomach and loosen our tongues.â€"

Peasant rugs, folkloric weavings, and other Balkan bric-a-brac filled Fischer's small living room, which also functioned as his library: early-twentieth-century volumes, in several languages, on Balkan nationalism, the Persian and Ottoman empires, the Byzantine heritage of Greece, and other subjects having to do with Europe's back-of-beyond. Fischer, with thick white hair, a mustache, and a wistful expression, wore suede trousers and a sleeveless sheepskin shepherd's vest. His rakish appearance and the backdrop of maps and trinkets reminded me of the Victorian explorer, linguist, and secret agent Sir Richard Francis Burton in old age, in his library in Trieste.1 It was to Fischer that I had come for advice before beginning my journey through the Near East, from the Balkans to Central Asia, what the Elizabethans called Tartary.

"I was born in 1923," Fischer told me, "in Kronstadt, in Transyl- vania, a mainly German city, which is now called Brasov in Romania. My father was a Hungarian Jew from a strictly Orthodox family. My mother was a Saxon German and a Lutheran. She was among the Nazis' favored Volksdeutsche—a term laden with racial implications, reserved for ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe and southern Russia. "My parents loved each other deeply. Does that surprise you? Before Hitler, relations between the ethnic groups were full of such irony and subtlety, you cannot imagine. My mother escaped from Communist Romania by pretending to be Jewish and going to Israel. My wife is also a Saxon Lutheran, from near Kronstadt. Of course," he added, smiling, "I was Jewish enough for the Nazis, but not enough to satisfy the Israeli rabbis of today." Fischer handed me his calling card. There was no telephone number or address on it, just two words:

rudolf fischer vakalaray

The Greek word, he explained, signified "a nineteenth-century writer of love letters" to women on behalf of their husbands, who were away in the Turkish army and did not know how to write their own.

We exchanged toasts, and Fischer unfurled his set of late-nineteenth-century Austrian army staff maps and a somewhat earlier German one. "These are the maps you must use at the start of your journey," he told me. "They are better than the Cold War-era maps. The maps before 1989 are, of course, useless. The Iron Curtain is still a social and cultural border. Do you know the real service provided by McDonald's in Hungary and the other formerly socialist countries? They are the only places where people—women, especially—can find a clean public lavatory."

Fischer washed down his second slivovitz with red wine. Pointing with his finger at the mid-nineteenth-century German map, he told me: "The Carpathian Mountains, which now run through Romania, mark the end of Europe and the beginning of the Near East. North and west of the Carpathians lay the old Austro-Hungarian empire. Here, the map is like a modern one—see how crowded it is with towns. But, look: To the south and east of the Carpathians, the map is virtually empty. That was the old Ottoman Turkish empire, where few surveys had been done and trade was not regulated—Walachia, Serbia, and Bulgaria. These places are still underdeveloped compared to Transylvania, Croatia, and Hungary."

Let me explain; it is less complicated than it sounds. Very simply put, the split running through the Balkans between the Austro- Hungarian and Ottoman empires to which Fischer referred reflects a much earlier division. In the fourth century a.d., the Roman empire divided into western and eastern halves. Rome remained the capital of the western empire, while Constantinople became the capital of the eastern one. Rome's western empire eventually gave way to Charlemagne's kingdom and to the Vatican: Western Europe, in other words. The eastern empire—Byzantium—was populated mainly by Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians, and later by Moslems, when the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople in 1453. The border between the eastern and western empires ran through the middle of what after World War I became the multiethnic state of Yugoslavia. When that state broke apart violently in 1991, at least initially it echoed the divi- sion of Rome sixteen centuries earlier: The Slovenes and Croats were Roman Catholics, heirs to a tradition that went back from Austria-Hungary to Rome in the West; the Serbs, however, were Eastern Orthodox and heirs to the Ottoman-Byzantine legacy of Rome in the East.

The Carpathians, which run northeast of the former Yugoslavia and divide Romania into two parts, reinforced this boundary between Rome and Byzantium and, later, between the Habsburg emperors in Vienna and the Turkish sultans in Constantinople. Rudolf Fischer told me that the Carpathians, which were not easily traversed, halted the eastward spread of European culture, marked by Romanesque and Gothic architecture and by the Renaissance and the Reformation.2 "This is why Greece, too, belongs to the East," Fischer said. He added that "Romania—because of the influence of the Renaissance and the Reformation in the northwest of the country—had been more developed than Greece before World War Two!"and waved his hand for emphasis. "It was only the Truman Doctrine—$10 billion in American aid, in 1940s dollars no less—that created today's westernized Greece.

ÆLet me go on in the same vein," Fischer continued. "The differences between the Hungarian Stalinist leader Má¡tyá¡s Rá¡kosi and the Romanian Stalinist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, and even more so between their successors, Já¡nos Ká¡dá¡r and Nicolae Ceausescu, were the differences—don't you see!—between Habsburg Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey. Rá¡kosi and Ká¡dá¡r may have been perverse Central Europeans, but as Hungarians, they were Central Europeans nonetheless. But Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceausescu were Oriental despots, from a part of Europe influenced more by Ottoman Turkey than by Habsburg Austria. That's why communism did less damage to Hungary than to Romania."

Indeed, in Central Europe, communism claimed to be the cure for the economic inequalities and other cruelties wrought by bourgeois industrial development, a radical liberal populism of a sort, while in the former Byzantine-Ottoman empire, where there had never been such modern development, communism was simply a destructive force, a second Mongol invasion.

"Vá¡ci utca," exclaimed Fischer, referring to a fashionable shopping street in Budapest, "with its chandeliers and Merry Widow atmosphere— that is not a creation of postcommunism but of communism itself as Hungarians, with their Central European tradition, interpreted it in the 1970s and 1980s."3

tT

History and geography, of course, are only blueprints upon which humankind superimposes the details.4 Take the Iron Curtain, a crea- ture less of geographical and cultural patterns than of late-World War II power politics, which created another division to go alongside the one that separated the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. In one sense, the differences in development between ex-Communist countries affected by Habsburg rule—such as Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland—and those affected by Byzantium and Ottoman Turkey—such as Romania and Bulgaria—are profound. In another sense, however, Hungary shares more than it may like to admit with its former Warsaw Pact allies Romania and Bulgaria. Fischer explained that despite its economic progress, Hungary still cannot easily escape its past:

"Our whores in Budapest are Russian and Ukrainian; our money—though it floats freely—is still worthless in the West; our oil and gas are from Russia; and we have mafia murders and corruption just like in the countries to the south and east. Mafia shootings and the drug trade put pressure on the Hungarian government to make [entrance] visas compulsory for Romanians, Serbs, and Ukrainians, who are thought to be the culprits, but that will never happen, because it will separate us from the ethnic Hungarians just over the [Romanian] border. We are tied to the ex-Communist East, whether we like it or not."

He might have added that the hallway in his building was dark and untidy, like many that I had seen throughout the formerly Communist world, where decades of state ownership had given people no incen- tive to maintain property, an attitude that was changing slowly. There was, too, the building itself, and all the others in Fischer's neighborhood, whose unfinished look and poor construction—plate glass and mustard-colored cinder blocks—were more typical of buildings in formerly Communist Central Asia than those in Austria, just a two-hour ride away by train. The Berlin Wall may have fallen in November 1989, but for a traveler almost a decade later, its ghost was still present.

"What about NATO?" I asked. "Will its new eastern frontier— following the admission of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary— mark the border of the Near East?"

"NATO doesn't matter," Fischer said, waving his hand dismissively. "Only the EU [European Union] is real." He explained that the European Union is about currency, border controls, passports, trade, interest rates, environmental and dietary regulations—the details of daily life—which will change Hungary. "For decades Austria was not part of NATO, but did you ever think of Austria as part of Eastern Europe or the Near East? Of course not." (Austria had not been part of the European Union, either, but its economy operated along the EU's free-market lines.)

Therefore, it appeared likely—at least if the EU expanded into Hungary, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Poland but took a decade to grant full membership to Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Turkey, and Russia—that the Western alliance would be an eerie variation of the Holy Roman Empire at its zenith in the eleventh century, and the split between Western and Eastern Christianity would be institutionalized once more, as it had been during the divisions between Rome and Byzantium and the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. The Near East would then begin on the border of Hungary and Romania. Completing the reemergence of this older map, Russia was now returning to the dimensions of sixteenth-century Muscovy: a vibrant city-state within a chaotic hinterland.5

"Hungarians want to spiritualize the frontiers—that is the word that they use here," Fischer remarked.

"You mean they want the borders to be filters: to protect, but not to divide," I said.

"Perhaps," Fischer replied dryly. "What the Hungarians really want is to let ethnic Hungarians from the east into Hungary, but nobody else." Fischer then railed against the "modern age" in Europe, in which democratic stirrings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries strengthened ethnic nationalism, while industrialization strengthened the power of states. The result was the collapse of multiethnic empires like Habsburg Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey and the rise of uniethnic powers like Germany and of nasty tribal principalities in the post-World War I Balkans, though they were in some cases called parliamentary democracies. Even the 1848 democratic revolutions in Central Europe, it seemed, were not so pure; they were based on ethnicity as much as on liberal ideals, and in Hungarian (Magyar) areas, at least, were opposed by the minority Croats, Serbs, and Romanians.6 For Fischer, with his background, the modern age had meant "Magyarization campaigns" and other forms of "ethnic cleansing," crucial to the establishment of petty states tyrannized by ethnic majorities. The modern age, he told me, was symbolized by what had happened on his twenty-first birthday, September 17, 1944:

"Because my father and I had fled Romania when World War Two broke out and managed to get visas to Australia, I was in the Australian army on my twenty-first birthday. My commanding officer had given me a short leave. Thus, I spent my birthday alone, walking in the Australian countryside and thinking about who among my family and friends back in Transylvania were alive or dead. What had happened to them?

"Soon after the war, I learned that on that very day, Hungarian soldiers shot the entire Jewish population of Sá¡rmá¡s, a village east of Kolozsvá¡r, in Transylvania.7 Those poor people. They had thought of themselves as Hungarians. They spoke Hungarian. They had managed to survive five years of fascism without being deported to concentration camps. It was as if they had been miraculously forgotten while every kind of horror reigned around them. Then their own Hungarian soldiers appeared in Sá¡rmá¡s, and what did they do? They herded all the Jews into pigsties for several days and then took them to a hill and massacred them. Within the Holocaust, there were many little pogroms."8

A week after Fischer told me this story, I would visit that same hill in Sarmaau, Romania. It was a vast and sloping fold of grass surrounded by villages of rotting wood, where wild pigs scampered through the mud and peasants in black sheepskins worked with scythes. I saw three lines of graves, 126 in all, each with a Star of David and a Hebrew inscription. The graves were surrounded by an ugly cement barrier, a brutal box that might be called "modern history." I climbed over the barrier and read the Romanian inscription:

. . . [Hungarian] fascist troops, the enemies of mankind, occupied the village of Sarmaau, where they herded all the Jews—men, women, and children—inside pigsties, where they kept them without food and tortured and humiliated them in the most vicious manner for ten days, after which they were taken to this hill of weeping and killed in the most sadistic ways on the eve of the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashanah. . . .9

Of course, this monument in Romania made no mention of equally horrible atrocities perpetrated against Jews by the Romanians themselves during World War II.

"That is why I remember so vividly walking alone in Australia on my twenty-first birthday," Fischer continued. "Because the memory of it was preserved by what I later found out had occurred on that same day in Sarmaau. You see, Robert, Hungarian nationalism, Romanian nationalism—they're all bad. The boundary formed by the Carpathians was benign compared to these modern nationalistic boundaries, because the Carpathians divided empires within which peoples and religions mixed. I am a cosmopolitan. That is what every civilized person must now try to be!"

I told him that cosmopolitanism must always be linked to memory. Without memory, there would be no possibility of irony—the very stuff of history. For, as Fischer said, Jews, Gypsies, Kurds, and other minorities were generally safe within autocratic regimes such as Habsburg Austria and Ottoman Turkey but were killed or oppressed when these autocracies began giving birth to independent states dominated by ethnic majorities, such as Austria, Hungary, Romania, Greece, and Turkey.

Fischer picked up his walking stick and told me to take my coat. "We're going for a walk. I have something to show you before you start your journey."

For thirty minutes, he led me briskly along dreary boulevards wheezing with traffic, through underpasses and an empty park, then along the tracks of a railway that wove through the foul backyards of old apartment buildings. We passed people wearing baggy clothes and soiled smocks, carrying battered briefcases. "You are now in what the early-twentieth-century Austrian writer Heimito von Doderer called 'the serious parts of a town,' where a city shows the ugly organs underneath its pretty skin,"Fischer remarked. I thought of the necklace of diamond-and-tomato-colored lights along the streets by the Danube, with their smart shops and packs of Western tourists, several tram stops away to the west: Budapest's downtown was already in Western Europe and the twenty-first century, but this part of town was still in Eastern Europe and, as I soon learned, living in the time before the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Near Orczy Square, in the far-off southeast corner of Budapest, we came to an immense hodgepodge of metal-framed stalls and greasy canteens set up in abandoned Russian railway cars. I saw Chinese- manufactured high-top running shoes on sale for the equivalent of ten dollars, sweaters for four dollars, socks, clocks, jackets, cell phones, shampoo, toys, and just about any other necessity—all cheap and made in either Asia or formerly Communist Europe. Many of the goods were Russian. The food at the canteens was Turkish. The merchants were Chinese, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and other Central Asian nationalities, but mostly Chinese. I noticed bus stops for destinations in Romania and other points east, but never west. Hungarian policemen were ubiquitous, for there had been several murders here recently. Nobody was well dressed.

"People in Budapest call this place the Chinese market,"Fischer told me. "It grew in the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed and China loosened travel restrictions on its own citizens. It is a real caravansary." Chinese families dominated a vast underground trading network that provided cheap goods for the overwhelming majority of people in Eastern Europe, who could not afford the new Western-style shops. Here, any language worked. Commerce was the great equalizer. "Yes, it is a bit violent, with gangland killings," Fischer said. "But is it any different from the backstreets of Odessa one or two hundred years ago, where my Jewish ancestors and yours were carrying on much as these people do now?

"This is all I have to show you, Robert," Fischer concluded. "Remember that the Iron Curtain still forms a community. Just look at this market. Over four decades of the most comprehensive repression cannot be wished away in a few years." Fischer guided me onto a tram and rode with me for a few stops. "It is good that you will be passing through Transylvania. Ah, so much to see there," he said, his voice full of longing. Then he stepped off the tram and waved good-bye by lifting his walking stick.

I left the tram near the Nyugati Pályaudvar, Budapest's soaring, iron-columned West Station, built by Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel in the 1870s, before he built his tower in Paris. From West Station, I began my journey east. Where I was going, and why, I shall now explain.
Copyright © 2001 by Robert D. Kaplan. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
© John Stanmeyer
Robert D. Kaplan is the bestselling author of twenty books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including Adriatic, The Good American, The Revenge of Geography, Asia’s Cauldron, Monsoon, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U.S. Navy’s Executive Panel. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.” View titles by Robert D. Kaplan
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About

Kaplan takes us on a spellbinding journey into the heart of a volatile region, stretching from Hungary and Romania to the far shores of the oil-rich Caspian Sea. Through dramatic stories of unforgettable characters, Kaplan illuminates the tragic history of this unstable area that he describes as the new fault line between East and West. He ventures from Turkey, Syria, and Israel to the turbulent countries of the Caucasus, from the newly rich city of Baku to the deserts of Turkmenistan and the killing fields of Armenia. The result is must reading for anyone concerned about the state of our world in the decades to come.

“Erudite and intrepid... [Kaplan] is a deft guide to wherever he chooses to lead you.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Packed with provocative insights.”—Washington Monthly

“A graceful writer... Providing historical (and cultural and religious) context is what Kaplan does best.”—Los Angeles Times

Excerpt

1

RUDOLF FISCHER, COSMOPOLITAN

The scent of plum brandy and red wine mixed with the mildew and dust from old books and maps. It was ten in the morning, February 17, 1998. I was in an apartment in the drab eastern outskirts of Budapest. My host, Rudolf Fischer, suggested that we start drinking. "The slivovitz is kosher—look at the Hebrew label! And the wine is young—from a barrel in Villá¡nyi, in southern Hungary. It will rest easy in your stomach and loosen our tongues.â€"

Peasant rugs, folkloric weavings, and other Balkan bric-a-brac filled Fischer's small living room, which also functioned as his library: early-twentieth-century volumes, in several languages, on Balkan nationalism, the Persian and Ottoman empires, the Byzantine heritage of Greece, and other subjects having to do with Europe's back-of-beyond. Fischer, with thick white hair, a mustache, and a wistful expression, wore suede trousers and a sleeveless sheepskin shepherd's vest. His rakish appearance and the backdrop of maps and trinkets reminded me of the Victorian explorer, linguist, and secret agent Sir Richard Francis Burton in old age, in his library in Trieste.1 It was to Fischer that I had come for advice before beginning my journey through the Near East, from the Balkans to Central Asia, what the Elizabethans called Tartary.

"I was born in 1923," Fischer told me, "in Kronstadt, in Transyl- vania, a mainly German city, which is now called Brasov in Romania. My father was a Hungarian Jew from a strictly Orthodox family. My mother was a Saxon German and a Lutheran. She was among the Nazis' favored Volksdeutsche—a term laden with racial implications, reserved for ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe and southern Russia. "My parents loved each other deeply. Does that surprise you? Before Hitler, relations between the ethnic groups were full of such irony and subtlety, you cannot imagine. My mother escaped from Communist Romania by pretending to be Jewish and going to Israel. My wife is also a Saxon Lutheran, from near Kronstadt. Of course," he added, smiling, "I was Jewish enough for the Nazis, but not enough to satisfy the Israeli rabbis of today." Fischer handed me his calling card. There was no telephone number or address on it, just two words:

rudolf fischer vakalaray

The Greek word, he explained, signified "a nineteenth-century writer of love letters" to women on behalf of their husbands, who were away in the Turkish army and did not know how to write their own.

We exchanged toasts, and Fischer unfurled his set of late-nineteenth-century Austrian army staff maps and a somewhat earlier German one. "These are the maps you must use at the start of your journey," he told me. "They are better than the Cold War-era maps. The maps before 1989 are, of course, useless. The Iron Curtain is still a social and cultural border. Do you know the real service provided by McDonald's in Hungary and the other formerly socialist countries? They are the only places where people—women, especially—can find a clean public lavatory."

Fischer washed down his second slivovitz with red wine. Pointing with his finger at the mid-nineteenth-century German map, he told me: "The Carpathian Mountains, which now run through Romania, mark the end of Europe and the beginning of the Near East. North and west of the Carpathians lay the old Austro-Hungarian empire. Here, the map is like a modern one—see how crowded it is with towns. But, look: To the south and east of the Carpathians, the map is virtually empty. That was the old Ottoman Turkish empire, where few surveys had been done and trade was not regulated—Walachia, Serbia, and Bulgaria. These places are still underdeveloped compared to Transylvania, Croatia, and Hungary."

Let me explain; it is less complicated than it sounds. Very simply put, the split running through the Balkans between the Austro- Hungarian and Ottoman empires to which Fischer referred reflects a much earlier division. In the fourth century a.d., the Roman empire divided into western and eastern halves. Rome remained the capital of the western empire, while Constantinople became the capital of the eastern one. Rome's western empire eventually gave way to Charlemagne's kingdom and to the Vatican: Western Europe, in other words. The eastern empire—Byzantium—was populated mainly by Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians, and later by Moslems, when the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople in 1453. The border between the eastern and western empires ran through the middle of what after World War I became the multiethnic state of Yugoslavia. When that state broke apart violently in 1991, at least initially it echoed the divi- sion of Rome sixteen centuries earlier: The Slovenes and Croats were Roman Catholics, heirs to a tradition that went back from Austria-Hungary to Rome in the West; the Serbs, however, were Eastern Orthodox and heirs to the Ottoman-Byzantine legacy of Rome in the East.

The Carpathians, which run northeast of the former Yugoslavia and divide Romania into two parts, reinforced this boundary between Rome and Byzantium and, later, between the Habsburg emperors in Vienna and the Turkish sultans in Constantinople. Rudolf Fischer told me that the Carpathians, which were not easily traversed, halted the eastward spread of European culture, marked by Romanesque and Gothic architecture and by the Renaissance and the Reformation.2 "This is why Greece, too, belongs to the East," Fischer said. He added that "Romania—because of the influence of the Renaissance and the Reformation in the northwest of the country—had been more developed than Greece before World War Two!"and waved his hand for emphasis. "It was only the Truman Doctrine—$10 billion in American aid, in 1940s dollars no less—that created today's westernized Greece.

ÆLet me go on in the same vein," Fischer continued. "The differences between the Hungarian Stalinist leader Má¡tyá¡s Rá¡kosi and the Romanian Stalinist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, and even more so between their successors, Já¡nos Ká¡dá¡r and Nicolae Ceausescu, were the differences—don't you see!—between Habsburg Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey. Rá¡kosi and Ká¡dá¡r may have been perverse Central Europeans, but as Hungarians, they were Central Europeans nonetheless. But Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceausescu were Oriental despots, from a part of Europe influenced more by Ottoman Turkey than by Habsburg Austria. That's why communism did less damage to Hungary than to Romania."

Indeed, in Central Europe, communism claimed to be the cure for the economic inequalities and other cruelties wrought by bourgeois industrial development, a radical liberal populism of a sort, while in the former Byzantine-Ottoman empire, where there had never been such modern development, communism was simply a destructive force, a second Mongol invasion.

"Vá¡ci utca," exclaimed Fischer, referring to a fashionable shopping street in Budapest, "with its chandeliers and Merry Widow atmosphere— that is not a creation of postcommunism but of communism itself as Hungarians, with their Central European tradition, interpreted it in the 1970s and 1980s."3

tT

History and geography, of course, are only blueprints upon which humankind superimposes the details.4 Take the Iron Curtain, a crea- ture less of geographical and cultural patterns than of late-World War II power politics, which created another division to go alongside the one that separated the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. In one sense, the differences in development between ex-Communist countries affected by Habsburg rule—such as Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland—and those affected by Byzantium and Ottoman Turkey—such as Romania and Bulgaria—are profound. In another sense, however, Hungary shares more than it may like to admit with its former Warsaw Pact allies Romania and Bulgaria. Fischer explained that despite its economic progress, Hungary still cannot easily escape its past:

"Our whores in Budapest are Russian and Ukrainian; our money—though it floats freely—is still worthless in the West; our oil and gas are from Russia; and we have mafia murders and corruption just like in the countries to the south and east. Mafia shootings and the drug trade put pressure on the Hungarian government to make [entrance] visas compulsory for Romanians, Serbs, and Ukrainians, who are thought to be the culprits, but that will never happen, because it will separate us from the ethnic Hungarians just over the [Romanian] border. We are tied to the ex-Communist East, whether we like it or not."

He might have added that the hallway in his building was dark and untidy, like many that I had seen throughout the formerly Communist world, where decades of state ownership had given people no incen- tive to maintain property, an attitude that was changing slowly. There was, too, the building itself, and all the others in Fischer's neighborhood, whose unfinished look and poor construction—plate glass and mustard-colored cinder blocks—were more typical of buildings in formerly Communist Central Asia than those in Austria, just a two-hour ride away by train. The Berlin Wall may have fallen in November 1989, but for a traveler almost a decade later, its ghost was still present.

"What about NATO?" I asked. "Will its new eastern frontier— following the admission of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary— mark the border of the Near East?"

"NATO doesn't matter," Fischer said, waving his hand dismissively. "Only the EU [European Union] is real." He explained that the European Union is about currency, border controls, passports, trade, interest rates, environmental and dietary regulations—the details of daily life—which will change Hungary. "For decades Austria was not part of NATO, but did you ever think of Austria as part of Eastern Europe or the Near East? Of course not." (Austria had not been part of the European Union, either, but its economy operated along the EU's free-market lines.)

Therefore, it appeared likely—at least if the EU expanded into Hungary, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Poland but took a decade to grant full membership to Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Turkey, and Russia—that the Western alliance would be an eerie variation of the Holy Roman Empire at its zenith in the eleventh century, and the split between Western and Eastern Christianity would be institutionalized once more, as it had been during the divisions between Rome and Byzantium and the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. The Near East would then begin on the border of Hungary and Romania. Completing the reemergence of this older map, Russia was now returning to the dimensions of sixteenth-century Muscovy: a vibrant city-state within a chaotic hinterland.5

"Hungarians want to spiritualize the frontiers—that is the word that they use here," Fischer remarked.

"You mean they want the borders to be filters: to protect, but not to divide," I said.

"Perhaps," Fischer replied dryly. "What the Hungarians really want is to let ethnic Hungarians from the east into Hungary, but nobody else." Fischer then railed against the "modern age" in Europe, in which democratic stirrings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries strengthened ethnic nationalism, while industrialization strengthened the power of states. The result was the collapse of multiethnic empires like Habsburg Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey and the rise of uniethnic powers like Germany and of nasty tribal principalities in the post-World War I Balkans, though they were in some cases called parliamentary democracies. Even the 1848 democratic revolutions in Central Europe, it seemed, were not so pure; they were based on ethnicity as much as on liberal ideals, and in Hungarian (Magyar) areas, at least, were opposed by the minority Croats, Serbs, and Romanians.6 For Fischer, with his background, the modern age had meant "Magyarization campaigns" and other forms of "ethnic cleansing," crucial to the establishment of petty states tyrannized by ethnic majorities. The modern age, he told me, was symbolized by what had happened on his twenty-first birthday, September 17, 1944:

"Because my father and I had fled Romania when World War Two broke out and managed to get visas to Australia, I was in the Australian army on my twenty-first birthday. My commanding officer had given me a short leave. Thus, I spent my birthday alone, walking in the Australian countryside and thinking about who among my family and friends back in Transylvania were alive or dead. What had happened to them?

"Soon after the war, I learned that on that very day, Hungarian soldiers shot the entire Jewish population of Sá¡rmá¡s, a village east of Kolozsvá¡r, in Transylvania.7 Those poor people. They had thought of themselves as Hungarians. They spoke Hungarian. They had managed to survive five years of fascism without being deported to concentration camps. It was as if they had been miraculously forgotten while every kind of horror reigned around them. Then their own Hungarian soldiers appeared in Sá¡rmá¡s, and what did they do? They herded all the Jews into pigsties for several days and then took them to a hill and massacred them. Within the Holocaust, there were many little pogroms."8

A week after Fischer told me this story, I would visit that same hill in Sarmaau, Romania. It was a vast and sloping fold of grass surrounded by villages of rotting wood, where wild pigs scampered through the mud and peasants in black sheepskins worked with scythes. I saw three lines of graves, 126 in all, each with a Star of David and a Hebrew inscription. The graves were surrounded by an ugly cement barrier, a brutal box that might be called "modern history." I climbed over the barrier and read the Romanian inscription:

. . . [Hungarian] fascist troops, the enemies of mankind, occupied the village of Sarmaau, where they herded all the Jews—men, women, and children—inside pigsties, where they kept them without food and tortured and humiliated them in the most vicious manner for ten days, after which they were taken to this hill of weeping and killed in the most sadistic ways on the eve of the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashanah. . . .9

Of course, this monument in Romania made no mention of equally horrible atrocities perpetrated against Jews by the Romanians themselves during World War II.

"That is why I remember so vividly walking alone in Australia on my twenty-first birthday," Fischer continued. "Because the memory of it was preserved by what I later found out had occurred on that same day in Sarmaau. You see, Robert, Hungarian nationalism, Romanian nationalism—they're all bad. The boundary formed by the Carpathians was benign compared to these modern nationalistic boundaries, because the Carpathians divided empires within which peoples and religions mixed. I am a cosmopolitan. That is what every civilized person must now try to be!"

I told him that cosmopolitanism must always be linked to memory. Without memory, there would be no possibility of irony—the very stuff of history. For, as Fischer said, Jews, Gypsies, Kurds, and other minorities were generally safe within autocratic regimes such as Habsburg Austria and Ottoman Turkey but were killed or oppressed when these autocracies began giving birth to independent states dominated by ethnic majorities, such as Austria, Hungary, Romania, Greece, and Turkey.

Fischer picked up his walking stick and told me to take my coat. "We're going for a walk. I have something to show you before you start your journey."

For thirty minutes, he led me briskly along dreary boulevards wheezing with traffic, through underpasses and an empty park, then along the tracks of a railway that wove through the foul backyards of old apartment buildings. We passed people wearing baggy clothes and soiled smocks, carrying battered briefcases. "You are now in what the early-twentieth-century Austrian writer Heimito von Doderer called 'the serious parts of a town,' where a city shows the ugly organs underneath its pretty skin,"Fischer remarked. I thought of the necklace of diamond-and-tomato-colored lights along the streets by the Danube, with their smart shops and packs of Western tourists, several tram stops away to the west: Budapest's downtown was already in Western Europe and the twenty-first century, but this part of town was still in Eastern Europe and, as I soon learned, living in the time before the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Near Orczy Square, in the far-off southeast corner of Budapest, we came to an immense hodgepodge of metal-framed stalls and greasy canteens set up in abandoned Russian railway cars. I saw Chinese- manufactured high-top running shoes on sale for the equivalent of ten dollars, sweaters for four dollars, socks, clocks, jackets, cell phones, shampoo, toys, and just about any other necessity—all cheap and made in either Asia or formerly Communist Europe. Many of the goods were Russian. The food at the canteens was Turkish. The merchants were Chinese, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and other Central Asian nationalities, but mostly Chinese. I noticed bus stops for destinations in Romania and other points east, but never west. Hungarian policemen were ubiquitous, for there had been several murders here recently. Nobody was well dressed.

"People in Budapest call this place the Chinese market,"Fischer told me. "It grew in the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed and China loosened travel restrictions on its own citizens. It is a real caravansary." Chinese families dominated a vast underground trading network that provided cheap goods for the overwhelming majority of people in Eastern Europe, who could not afford the new Western-style shops. Here, any language worked. Commerce was the great equalizer. "Yes, it is a bit violent, with gangland killings," Fischer said. "But is it any different from the backstreets of Odessa one or two hundred years ago, where my Jewish ancestors and yours were carrying on much as these people do now?

"This is all I have to show you, Robert," Fischer concluded. "Remember that the Iron Curtain still forms a community. Just look at this market. Over four decades of the most comprehensive repression cannot be wished away in a few years." Fischer guided me onto a tram and rode with me for a few stops. "It is good that you will be passing through Transylvania. Ah, so much to see there," he said, his voice full of longing. Then he stepped off the tram and waved good-bye by lifting his walking stick.

I left the tram near the Nyugati Pályaudvar, Budapest's soaring, iron-columned West Station, built by Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel in the 1870s, before he built his tower in Paris. From West Station, I began my journey east. Where I was going, and why, I shall now explain.
Copyright © 2001 by Robert D. Kaplan. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author

© John Stanmeyer
Robert D. Kaplan is the bestselling author of twenty books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including Adriatic, The Good American, The Revenge of Geography, Asia’s Cauldron, Monsoon, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U.S. Navy’s Executive Panel. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.” View titles by Robert D. Kaplan

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    Patrick Symmes
    978-0-375-70265-5
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 15, 2000
  • A Tuscan Childhood
    A Tuscan Childhood
    Kinta Beevor
    978-0-375-70426-0
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 08, 2000
  • Lasso the Wind
    Lasso the Wind
    Away to the New West
    Timothy Egan
    978-0-679-78182-0
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 26, 1999
  • One for the Road
    One for the Road
    An Outback Adventure
    Tony Horwitz
    978-0-375-70613-4
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 05, 1999
  • An Empire Wilderness
    An Empire Wilderness
    Travels into America's Future
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-679-77687-1
    $18.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 07, 1999
  • Two in the Wild
    Two in the Wild
    Tales of Adventure from Friends, Mothers, and Daughters
    978-0-375-70201-3
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 31, 1999
  • Inside the Sky
    Inside the Sky
    A Meditation on Flight
    William Langewiesche
    978-0-679-75007-9
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 29, 1999
  • A Beginner's Guide to Japan
    A Beginner's Guide to Japan
    Observations and Provocations
    Pico Iyer
    978-1-101-97347-9
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 02, 2020
  • My Twenty-five Years in Provence
    My Twenty-five Years in Provence
    Reflections on Then and Now
    Peter Mayle
    978-1-101-97428-5
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 28, 2019
  • Shark Drunk
    Shark Drunk
    Morten Stroksnes
    978-1-101-97293-9
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 12, 2018
  • Ruthless River
    Ruthless River
    Love and Survival by Raft on the Amazon's Relentless Madre de Dios
    Holly FitzGerald
    978-0-525-43277-7
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 30, 2017
  • Elephant Complex
    Elephant Complex
    Travels in Sri Lanka
    John Gimlette
    978-0-345-80699-4
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 21, 2017
  • Driving Hungry
    Driving Hungry
    A Delicious Journey, from Buenos Aires to New York to Berlin
    Layne Mosler
    978-0-345-80267-5
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 28, 2016
  • Skyfaring
    Skyfaring
    A Journey with a Pilot
    Mark Vanhoenacker
    978-0-8041-6971-4
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 03, 2016
  • After the Dance
    After the Dance
    A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (Updated)
    Edwidge Danticat
    978-1-101-87291-8
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 28, 2015
  • Calcutta
    Calcutta
    Two Years in the City
    Amit Chaudhuri
    978-0-307-45466-9
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 14, 2015
  • The Nile
    The Nile
    Travelling Downriver Through Egypt's Past and Present
    Toby Wilkinson
    978-0-8041-6890-8
    $19.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 03, 2015
  • Hell or High Water
    Hell or High Water
    Surviving Tibet's Tsango River
    Peter Heller
    978-1-101-87204-8
    $15.99 US
    Ebook
    Vintage
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  • Travels
    Travels
    Michael Crichton
    978-0-8041-7127-4
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 11, 2014
  • Gun Guys
    Gun Guys
    A Road Trip
    Dan Baum
    978-0-307-74250-6
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 03, 2013
  • The Age of Kali
    The Age of Kali
    Indian Travels & Encounters
    William Dalrymple
    978-0-307-94890-8
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 02, 2012
  • Wild Coast
    Wild Coast
    Travels on South America's Untamed Edge
    John Gimlette
    978-0-307-47362-2
    $17.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 12, 2012
  • India
    India
    A Portrait
    Patrick French
    978-0-307-47348-6
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 05, 2012
  • The Hard Way Around
    The Hard Way Around
    The Passages of Joshua Slocum
    Geoffrey Wolff
    978-0-307-74545-3
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 29, 2011
  • Paris
    Paris
    The Collected Traveler--An Inspired Companion Guide
    Barrie Kerper
    978-0-307-47489-6
    $19.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 12, 2011
  • Nine Lives
    Nine Lives
    In Search of the Sacred in Modern India
    William Dalrymple
    978-0-307-47446-9
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 14, 2011
  • The Tiger
    The Tiger
    A True Story of Vengeance and Survival
    John Vaillant
    978-0-307-38904-6
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 03, 2011
  • Aloft
    Aloft
    Thoughts on the Experience of Flight
    William Langewiesche
    978-0-307-74148-6
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 19, 2010
  • Tuscany and Umbria
    Tuscany and Umbria
    The Collected Traveler--An Inspired Companion Guide
    Barrie Kerper
    978-0-307-47490-2
    $19.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 27, 2010
  • The Lost City of Z
    The Lost City of Z
    A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
    David Grann
    978-1-4000-7845-5
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 26, 2010
  • Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes
    Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes
    Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
    Daniel L. Everett
    978-0-307-38612-0
    $19.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 03, 2009
  • Istanbul: The Collected Traveler
    Istanbul: The Collected Traveler
    An Inspired Companion Guide
    Barrie Kerper
    978-0-307-39059-2
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 15, 2009
  • Zen and Now
    Zen and Now
    On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
    Mark Richardson
    978-0-307-39069-1
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 08, 2009
  • Near Death in the Desert
    Near Death in the Desert
    True Stories of Disaster and Survival
    978-0-307-27936-1
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 14, 2009
  • The Open Road
    The Open Road
    The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
    Pico Iyer
    978-0-307-38755-4
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • Near Death in the Arctic
    Near Death in the Arctic
    True Stories of Disaster and Survival
    978-0-307-27937-8
    $19.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 10, 2009
  • Provence A-Z
    Provence A-Z
    A Francophile's Essential Handbook
    Peter Mayle
    978-1-4000-9569-8
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 02, 2008
  • Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts
    Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts
    The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-1-4000-3458-1
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 09, 2008
  • Near Death in the Mountains
    Near Death in the Mountains
    True Stories of Disaster and Survival
    978-0-307-27935-4
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 08, 2008
  • The Boys from Dolores
    The Boys from Dolores
    Fidel Castro's Schoolmates from Revolution to Exile
    Patrick Symmes
    978-1-4000-7644-4
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 06, 2008
  • Disappearing Destinations
    Disappearing Destinations
    37 Places in Peril and What Can Be Done to Help Save Them
    Kimberly Lisagor, Heather Hansen
    978-0-307-27736-7
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 08, 2008
  • Greetings from Bury Park
    Greetings from Bury Park
    Sarfraz Manzoor
    978-0-307-38802-5
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 08, 2008
  • Near Death on the High Seas
    Near Death on the High Seas
    True Stories of Disaster and Survival
    978-0-307-27934-7
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 11, 2008
  • The Father of All Things
    The Father of All Things
    A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam
    Tom Bissell
    978-1-4000-7543-0
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 11, 2008
  • Tales from the Torrid Zone
    Tales from the Torrid Zone
    Travels in the Deep Tropics
    Alexander Frater
    978-0-307-38826-1
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 12, 2008
  • Shutting Out the Sun
    Shutting Out the Sun
    How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation
    Michael Zielenziger
    978-1-4000-7779-3
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 04, 2007
  • Little Money Street
    Little Money Street
    In Search of Gypsies and Their Music in the South of France
    Fernanda Eberstadt
    978-0-307-27942-2
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 14, 2007
  • Spain in Mind: An Anthology
    Spain in Mind: An Anthology
    From Byron, Trollope, and Wharton to Auden, Orwell, and Hemingway--Three Centuries of Great Writers Entranced by Spain
    978-1-4000-7676-5
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 10, 2007
  • Theatre of Fish
    Theatre of Fish
    Travels Through Newfoundland and Labrador
    John Gimlette
    978-1-4000-7853-0
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 14, 2006
  • Imperial Grunts
    Imperial Grunts
    On the Ground with the American Military, from Mongolia to the Philippines to Iraq and Beyond
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-1-4000-3457-4
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 12, 2006
  • Mexico in Mind
    Mexico in Mind
    An Anthology
    Maria Finn Dominguez
    978-0-307-27488-5
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 13, 2006
  • Trawler
    Trawler
    A Journey Through the North Atlantic
    Redmond O'Hanlon
    978-1-4000-7810-3
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 03, 2006
  • The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer
    The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer
    Close Encounters with Strangers
    Eric Hansen
    978-0-679-77182-1
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 18, 2005
  • Tuscany in Mind
    Tuscany in Mind
    From Byron and the Brownings to Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Lowell, and Penelope Fitzgerald--Two Centuries of Great Writers Seduced by Tuscany
    978-1-4000-7675-8
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 17, 2005
  • Sun After Dark
    Sun After Dark
    Flights Into the Foreign
    Pico Iyer
    978-1-4000-3103-0
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 12, 2005
  • Mediterranean Winter
    Mediterranean Winter
    The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and the Peloponnese
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-375-71433-7
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 08, 2005
  • At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig
    At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig
    Travels Through Paraguay
    John Gimlette
    978-1-4000-7852-3
    $17.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 08, 2005
  • India in Mind
    India in Mind
    978-0-375-72745-0
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 04, 2005
  • Chasing the Sea
    Chasing the Sea
    Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia
    Tom Bissell
    978-0-375-72754-2
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 12, 2004
  • Tibet, Tibet
    Tibet, Tibet
    A Personal History of a Lost Land
    Patrick French
    978-1-4000-3417-8
    $17.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 28, 2004
  • Cuba in Mind
    Cuba in Mind
    An Anthology
    978-1-4000-7613-0
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 08, 2004
  • Bayou Farewell
    Bayou Farewell
    The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast
    Mike Tidwell
    978-0-375-72517-3
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 09, 2004
  • In Search of Zarathustra
    In Search of Zarathustra
    Across Iran and Central Asia to Find the World's First Prophet
    Paul Kriwaczek
    978-1-4000-3142-9
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 09, 2004
  • Surrender or Starve
    Surrender or Starve
    Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-1-4000-3452-9
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 11, 2003
  • Yearning for the Land
    Yearning for the Land
    A Search for Homeland in Scotland and America
    John W. Simpson
    978-0-375-72547-0
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 14, 2003
  • Hold the Enlightenment
    Hold the Enlightenment
    Tim Cahill
    978-0-375-71329-3
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 09, 2003
  • Paris In Mind
    Paris In Mind
    From Mark Twain to Langston Hughes, from Saul Bellow to David Sedaris: Three Centuries of Americans Writing About Their Romance (and Frustrations) with Paris
    978-1-4000-3102-3
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 08, 2003
  • Somebody's Heart Is Burning
    Somebody's Heart Is Burning
    A Woman Wanderer in Africa
    Tanya Shaffer
    978-1-4000-3259-4
    $13.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 13, 2003
  • France in Mind: An Anthology
    France in Mind: An Anthology
    From Henry James, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway to Peter Mayle and Adam Gopnik--A Feast of British and American Writers Celebrate France
    978-0-375-71435-1
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 11, 2003
  • Coasting
    Coasting
    A Private Voyage
    Jonathan Raban
    978-0-375-72593-7
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 04, 2003
  • The River's Tale
    The River's Tale
    A Year on the Mekong
    Edward Gargan
    978-0-375-70559-5
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 07, 2003
  • What You See in Clear Water
    What You See in Clear Water
    Indians, Whites, and a Battle Over Water in the American West
    Geoffrey O'Gara
    978-0-679-73582-3
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 13, 2002
  • Looking for Lovedu
    Looking for Lovedu
    A Woman's Journey Through Africa
    Ann Jones
    978-0-375-70533-5
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 09, 2002
  • Goodbye to a River
    Goodbye to a River
    A Narrative
    John Graves
    978-0-375-72778-8
    $17.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 09, 2002
  • French Lessons
    French Lessons
    Adventures with Knife, Fork, and Corkscrew
    Peter Mayle
    978-0-375-70561-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 09, 2002
  • Ultimate Journey
    Ultimate Journey
    Retracing the Path of an Ancient Buddhist Monk Who Crossed Asia in Search of Enlightenment
    Richard Bernstein
    978-0-679-78157-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 05, 2002
  • Foreign Land
    Foreign Land
    A Novel
    Jonathan Raban
    978-0-375-72594-4
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 04, 2001
  • Soldiers of God
    Soldiers of God
    With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-1-4000-3025-5
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 27, 2001
  • The Nature of Generosity
    The Nature of Generosity
    William Kittredge
    978-0-679-75687-3
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 13, 2001
  • Rolling Nowhere
    Rolling Nowhere
    Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes
    Ted Conover
    978-0-375-72786-3
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 11, 2001
  • Driving Over Lemons
    Driving Over Lemons
    An Optimist in Spain
    Chris Stewart
    978-0-375-70915-9
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 08, 2001
  • The Global Soul
    The Global Soul
    Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home
    Pico Iyer
    978-0-679-77611-6
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 13, 2001
  • Orchid Fever
    Orchid Fever
    A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy
    Eric Hansen
    978-0-679-77183-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 27, 2001
  • Stranger in the Forest
    Stranger in the Forest
    On Foot Across Borneo
    Eric Hansen
    978-0-375-72495-4
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 14, 2000
  • Passage to Juneau
    Passage to Juneau
    A Sea and Its Meanings
    Jonathan Raban
    978-0-679-77614-7
    $19.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 07, 2000
  • Tokyo Underworld
    Tokyo Underworld
    The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan
    Robert Whiting
    978-0-375-72489-3
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 26, 2000
  • Encore Provence
    Encore Provence
    New Adventures in the South of France
    Peter Mayle
    978-0-679-76269-0
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 25, 2000
  • Journey to the Vanished City
    Journey to the Vanished City
    The Search for a Lost Tribe of Israel
    Tudor Parfitt
    978-0-375-72454-1
    $18.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 04, 2000
  • Ireland in Mind: An Anthology
    Ireland in Mind: An Anthology
    Three Centuries of Irish, English, and American Writers in Search of the Real Ireland
    978-0-375-70344-7
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 07, 2000
  • Cairo
    Cairo
    The City Victorious
    Max Rodenbeck
    978-0-679-76727-5
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 22, 2000
  • Chasing Che
    Chasing Che
    A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend
    Patrick Symmes
    978-0-375-70265-5
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 15, 2000
  • A Tuscan Childhood
    A Tuscan Childhood
    Kinta Beevor
    978-0-375-70426-0
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 08, 2000
  • Lasso the Wind
    Lasso the Wind
    Away to the New West
    Timothy Egan
    978-0-679-78182-0
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 26, 1999
  • One for the Road
    One for the Road
    An Outback Adventure
    Tony Horwitz
    978-0-375-70613-4
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 05, 1999
  • An Empire Wilderness
    An Empire Wilderness
    Travels into America's Future
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-679-77687-1
    $18.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 07, 1999
  • Two in the Wild
    Two in the Wild
    Tales of Adventure from Friends, Mothers, and Daughters
    978-0-375-70201-3
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 31, 1999
  • Inside the Sky
    Inside the Sky
    A Meditation on Flight
    William Langewiesche
    978-0-679-75007-9
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 29, 1999

Other Books by this Author

  • The Loom of Time
    The Loom of Time
    Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-593-24279-7
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Random House
    Aug 22, 2023
  • Adriatic
    Adriatic
    A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-399-59105-1
    $18.99 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Apr 25, 2023
  • The Good American
    The Good American
    The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U.S. Government's Greatest Humanitarian
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-525-51231-8
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Feb 15, 2022
  • The Return of Marco Polo's World
    The Return of Marco Polo's World
    War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-8129-8661-7
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    May 21, 2019
  • Earning the Rockies
    Earning the Rockies
    How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-399-58822-8
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Nov 07, 2017
  • In Europe's Shadow
    In Europe's Shadow
    Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-8129-8662-4
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Nov 01, 2016
  • Asia's Cauldron
    Asia's Cauldron
    The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-8129-8480-4
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Jan 06, 2015
  • The Revenge of Geography
    The Revenge of Geography
    What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-8129-8222-0
    $19.00 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Sep 10, 2013
  • Monsoon
    Monsoon
    The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-8129-7920-6
    $18.99 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Sep 13, 2011
  • Warrior Politics
    Warrior Politics
    Why Leadership Requires a Pagan Ethos
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-375-72627-9
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 07, 2003
  • The Coming Anarchy
    The Coming Anarchy
    Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-375-70759-9
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 13, 2001
  • The Ends of the Earth
    The Ends of the Earth
    From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-679-75123-6
    $18.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 28, 1997
  • The Loom of Time
    The Loom of Time
    Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-593-24279-7
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Random House
    Aug 22, 2023
  • Adriatic
    Adriatic
    A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-399-59105-1
    $18.99 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Apr 25, 2023
  • The Good American
    The Good American
    The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U.S. Government's Greatest Humanitarian
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-525-51231-8
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Feb 15, 2022
  • The Return of Marco Polo's World
    The Return of Marco Polo's World
    War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-8129-8661-7
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    May 21, 2019
  • Earning the Rockies
    Earning the Rockies
    How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-399-58822-8
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Nov 07, 2017
  • In Europe's Shadow
    In Europe's Shadow
    Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-8129-8662-4
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Nov 01, 2016
  • Asia's Cauldron
    Asia's Cauldron
    The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-8129-8480-4
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Jan 06, 2015
  • The Revenge of Geography
    The Revenge of Geography
    What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-8129-8222-0
    $19.00 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Sep 10, 2013
  • Monsoon
    Monsoon
    The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-8129-7920-6
    $18.99 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Sep 13, 2011
  • Warrior Politics
    Warrior Politics
    Why Leadership Requires a Pagan Ethos
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-375-72627-9
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 07, 2003
  • The Coming Anarchy
    The Coming Anarchy
    Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-375-70759-9
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 13, 2001
  • The Ends of the Earth
    The Ends of the Earth
    From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy
    Robert D. Kaplan
    978-0-679-75123-6
    $18.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 28, 1997
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