On a rainy day in June 2017, Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, traveled to a remote monastery in the Valdai Hills, some 220 miles northwest of Moscow. He had come to consecrate the source of the Volga River. From a wooden platform, Kirill read a blessing, swung an incense-laden censer, and kneeled, dipping a golden orthodox cross in the headwaters of what he called “the great Russian river.”

The Volga is not Russia’s longest river (though it is Europe’s). But as the religious pomp suggests, it is by far the country’s most significant. “Russia would not exist without the Volga,” Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, tells Marzio Mian, an Italian journalist and the author of Volga Blues: A Journey Into the Heart of Russia. “It’s the life force of a nation. Symbol and destiny. It’s the autobiography of a people.”

Volga Blues is Mian’s chronicle of a monthlong, mostly landbound journey he took down the entire 2,000-mile river in the summer of 2023. To travel freely, without the restrictions usually placed on foreign journalists, he presented himself as a historian gathering material about the Volga, accompanied by a photojournalist using a tourist’s camera and two Russian translator-fixers. In reality, Mian asked his subjects about their lives, Russia, and the war in Ukraine, going as far as he dared without arousing too much suspicion. He quotes their conversations at length and changes many of their names for security reasons.

As a result, the book brims with rare, candid, and colorful glimpses of Russia and its people during a period of immense repression, secrecy, and violence. That was the summer of the Wagner Group rebellion, when Yevgeny Prigozhin marched his private army toward Moscow, only to call the mutiny off a day later. “[A]ny attempts to create internal turmoil are doomed to failure,” Vladimir Putin said in a speech afterward, making a charged reference to smuta, a period of severe political crisis in the early 17th century that continues to summon dread in Russia today.

Putin spoke of a “tremendous coming together of society” in the aftermath of Prigozhin’s would-be smuta. Mian’s book presents a different sketch of Russia. Not of a society coming apart, but of one that is much more chaotic, diverse, and often incoherent than either Kremlin news conferences or Western headlines would have us believe.

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Consider the story of the sausage oligarch, Ivan Kazankov. A gas station attendant points Mian and his team to Kazankov’s sovkhoz in the Mari El Republic, along the Volga’s northern bank. Mian assumes the worker is using the Soviet-era term for a state-owned collective farm anachronistically. But Kazankov’s meat-processing plan is, at first glance, a fully functional sovkhoz, complete with Soviet flags, a Stalin statue, and portraits of employees who had won productivity awards: best sausage stuffer, best tractor driver, best agronomist.

It turns out that the farm, which identifies as a “Communist-Stalinist enterprise,” was established in 1995, four years after communism fell, during Russia’s wild transition to a market economy. It’s a family-owned megafarm, not a state-owned co-op, although it has all the dressings of an “idyllic Communist past,” Mian writes. Kazankov feeds his profits back to his workers’ wages and eats in the same cafeteria as them, albeit at a private table behind a curtain. “What matters is that it runs as before,” he explains, a heyday before the neoliberal disaster of the 1990s, when the economy tanked, casting workers into poverty and unemployment, and society into chaos and violence.

The privatized sovkhoz model is reassuring and stable, if incoherent. Kazankov welcomes Mian into an office seemingly decorated “with the express purpose of disorienting anyone hoping to understand contemporary Russia.” It is a hodgepodge of Russian iconography: a bust of Stalin here, a portrait of Nicholas II there, and a picture of Putin next to a saint.

Many of the people Mian meets along his journey embody a similarly scrambled worldview. Mikhail S., a philologist who tours Mian around the city of Tver, calls it Russia’s “rough and incoherent soup of identity.” Ingredients with clashing flavors make it into the pot: Stalinism, nationalism, monarchism, Christianity, imperialism.

The transhistorical idea of “Russia,” broadly defined, is the obvious link between Stalin and the tsars. It’s a sort of Russkiy mir cinematic universe, to borrow Putin’s term for an expansionist Russian world. Some characters don’t make the cast; Vladimir Lenin is one. In his hometown of Ulyanovsk, renamed for his family name Ulyanov, Lenin is an “unmentionable,” says Dimitri Rusin, an academic and tour guide. Lenin’s childhood home draws far fewer tourists now than several decades ago. His likeness is conspicuously absent from tchotchkes and apparel, whereas Stalin T-shirts are all the rage with the Russian youth. One teenage girl whom Mian and company encounter on a boat ride in Yaroslavl changes into hers to elicit a reaction from the Westerners.

Why the difference? Like Kazankov’s meat farm, Stalin—astoundingly—has come to represent an idealized version of tsar-like Russian might, the Soviet Union’s military triumphs without the baggage of communist doctrine. “Lenin is too cerebral—he doesn’t fit into today’s need for easy approximations,” Rustin explains. “He’s too European.”

Europe, in Mian’s account, is the most reviled entity along the Volga. Even the hippies don’t like it. At a remote homestead in the Zhiguli Mountains, Mian meets Levsha, a 32-year-old reggae singer; his wife, Anna; and their children. They eat green beans and chickpeas with pine juice and stroll through a hillside of wild cannabis. At a safe distance from the modern Russian police state, Anna and Levsha express their dislike for Putin. And yet, Mian points out, their values overlap with Putin’s government. They believe in Russian spiritual superiority and raising an old-fashioned family. “People like us, who hold the old Russia in their hearts, are the ones who safeguard the roots of Europe,” Anna says. She means a mystical, traditional Europe, quite dissimilar from the real one—the one at war with Russia.

War has forced their riverine pacifism into hiding. They take Mian on a raft trip to a secret community on a secluded island in the Volga, where the 100 or so residents freely admit an inability to accept wartime reality. One of the community’s four rules is “no news about the war, on pain of being deported to ‘Russia.’” They have built houses with solar panels and water filtration systems. They meditate, read poetry, and practice yoga. They sing in other Volga languages, such as Chuvash and Mari, and play reggae with balalaikas and bayans. One of its founders explains its goal: to build a real, authentic Russia, unlike the one surrounding them. “Everything is scary out there,” he says. “We found the real Russia within ourselves.”

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Not everyone has an island to escape to. For others, there is a real Russia, waging a brutal, full-scale war against Ukraine that has lasted longer than the Soviet Union’s involvement in World War II and has touched every Russian’s life. At the time of Mian’s trip, about a year and a half into the war, Russia had already suffered over 250,000 casualties; it now has 1 million more. If polls in Russia can be trusted, more than 70 percent of Russians backed the war in the summer of 2023; those numbers have not slipped since. Perhaps it’s an indication that Putin was correct—that despite the large, stewing muddle known as the Russian people, there is no smuta. Things have held together.

Most of Mian’s subjects are not delusional about the costs of war, but unlike the island-dwelling nonconformists, they are willing to accept the staggering casualties. They have their reasons. Kazankov, the agro-oligarch, is getting filthy rich, as sanctions have pushed Russians to consume domestic goods. An abbess at the source of the Volga is convinced Russia is fighting the devil. A local historian visiting a memorial to the Eastern Front battles, known as the Rzhev Meat Grinder, thinks they’re fighting a new wave of Nazism. She’s optimistic about Russia’s chances. “More than our weapons, what the West fears is our willingness to sacrifice our lives,” she explains. “Heart is our real atomic bomb.”

Mian’s views on the war are rather contrarian for a Western journalist. He compares the praise that European media lavishes on NATO to Stalinist propaganda, noting that to question its righteousness “is seen as heretical.” He condemns “hysterical Russophobia.” (As Gary Saul Morson points out in the Wall Street Journal, history is not this book’s strong suit.) But Volga Blue’s strength—its ability to show ordinary Russians’ humanity at a time of horror—comes most clearly from Mian’s willingness to witness and observe, to engage his subjects with curiosity, rather than apply judgements or ready-made explanations.

The book’s most poignant episode takes place in a village outside of Rybinsk, where the group meets the widow and 18-year-old daughter of an ethnic Romani taxi driver who stepped on a landmine in Donbas in the fall of 2022. The man, named Pavel, had enlisted in the war to pay off the debts he accrued buying his taxi license. “Are you out of your mind?” Valentina, the widow, recalls asking. “Did you think about us? You’re almost an old man, Pavel, it’s not up to you. Your hip hurts all the time, you’re always saying that.”

Pavel went off to war anyway, with just one week of training. “I want to show these fuckers how much Gypsies love Russia,” he told his wife. He admired Stalin for helping free his grandfather from brutal servitude as a burlak, a man who hauled boats against the Volga’s current. He blamed the United States for turning Ukraine against Russia. He wanted to humiliate the countries that left the Soviet Union.

“But he left only to make a few bucks, that’s what I think, his ideals didn’t have anything to do with it,” Valentina says. “In the end, my Pavel was a mercenary, right?”