In Putin's footsteps: searching for the soul of an empire across Russia's eleven time zones

Kaliningrad: the amber-tinted gaze of an empire

Kiev: the mother of all Russian cities or the threat to mother Russia?

Arkhangelsk, Solovetsky Islands, Saint Petersburg, and Moscow: Kremlin time, or Russia's clock of clocks

Ulyanovsk (Simbirsk) and Samara (Kuibyshev): cities of the mighty Volga

Perm, Yekaterinburg, and Tyumen: the Urals' holy trinity

Omsk: a mixed metaphor of Putin's empire

Novosibirsk: a story of science and serendipity

Ulan-ude, Irkutsk, and Lake Baikal: Asian abodes of the spirit

Blagoveshchensk-Heihe and Yakutsk: roughing it

Vladivostok: rule the East!

Magadan and Butugychag: from the Gulag capital to the Valley of Death

Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky: the very far East

The past of the Russian future.