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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.”

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: A Journey into the Heart of Russia, Marzio G. Mian, trans. Elettra Pauletto, W. W. Norton & Company, 304 pp., $31.99, January 2026

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........

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