When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, fifteen new countries were born. Thirty-five years on, what has become of them?

In the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Joe Luc Barnes set out to cross the former USSR to find out. From the silk road cities of Uzbekistan to the former gulags of Kazakhstan, tech-hungry Estonia to the storied vineyards of Georgia, he traces the very different paths these nations have taken since independence.

Travelling by rattling platzkart train, hitch-hiking and riding in the white cars mandated by Turkmenistan’s dictator, he gathers voices along the way: nomads living in mountain yurts, professors forced out of universities, TikTok-fuelled activists, and doctors nursing him back to health in an Armenian hospital.

Barnes is in Moscow when Putin invades Ukraine and ends his journey in war-torn Kyiv. 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.