The Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991. It took some five years of revolution and civil war to establish the Union, and millions of human lives. It took a week to dissolve it, in a small villa in the middle of a forest in Belarus. No people got killed, although in the aftermath many regional ethic conflicts took place, some of which are unresolved to date. The Soviet Union was in some ways a continuation of the Russian Empire that the czars had built in the course of centuries. And Russia still considers much of the territory as belonging to its sphere of influence. This book is about travels troughout the former Soviet Union and the now independent republic that were once part of it. The author (1942) is a geographer who worked in statistics most of his life. He is a resident of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.