Colin Thubron · 1983 · road

Colin Thubron's account of driving ten thousand miles alone through the western Soviet Union in 1980 - the first Western traveller allowed to do it by car. He was followed, searched and repeatedly warned off, and spent the trip in other people's kitchens, listening to a country talk about itself in a way it could not do in print.

1. 1
   Leningrad

   Thubron drives across the border alone in an old car with a boot full of spares, into a country where a foreigner travelling unescorted is an anomaly the system does not really have a procedure for - which is precisely his method.

2. 2
   Moscow

   In Moscow he is shadowed, propositioned by dissidents and by informers, and invited into flats where people tell him things at two in the morning that they would not say to each other at noon.

3. 3
   Kiev

   South into Ukraine, to Babi Yar and the war memorials, in a country still counting a war forty years on - and Thubron's central subject emerges: what belief the Soviet Union actually runs on, now that almost nobody holds it.

4. 4
   Tbilisi

   Over the Caucasus into Georgia, where the rules are visibly different, the black market is the economy and the hospitality is overwhelming and slightly menacing - and Moscow is spoken of as a foreign capital.

5. 5
   Yerevan

   In Armenia he reaches the oldest Christian nation and the memorial to the genocide, and the journey ends among people whose sense of themselves long predates and will outlast the state he has been driving through.