#1703 Russia and America Today: A Journey Down the Volga River

Listening to America

Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 May 2026

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Clay's conversation with Italian journalist Marzio Mian about his new book, Volga Blues: A Journey into the Heart of Russia. Mian and his photographer spent four weeks following the Volga River from its source northwest of Moscow to its mouth on the Caspian Sea. The Volga River is considered the mother and the flowing heart of Russia. Traveling by car with two sometimes dubious Russian guides, Marzio and his partner attempted to stay below the radar of the paranoid Russian government, now grinding through its fourth year of war against its neighbor, Ukraine. In this extraordinary interview, Marzio explains that the Russian people don't see the world as we do in the West. They believe they are fighting a defensive war in Ukraine against NATO, Europe, and the U.S., defending the sacred homeland from western aggression, territorial ambition, and cultural decadence. His goal was to encounter ordinary Russian people, to learn how they see the war in Ukraine, how they view Vladimir Putin now, in the 26th year of his dictatorship, and how they regard the Volga River, the spiritual artery of an ancient and mysterious civilization. This episode was recorded on February 14, 2026.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone. It's Clay Jenkinson, introducing this week's podcast. I'm talking to my friend Marzio Mion, this wonderful man. I just love Marzio from Milan. We've known each other now for 10 years. I first met him in the Badlands of North Dakota. He was here doing a project, a documentary project on the Missouri-Mississippi system, and so we met out on the Little
0:21.6	Missouri River in a petrified forest and had an interview there. Then I've gone to work with him
0:28.0	in Milan a couple of times. I'll be going back in July. He's one of my favorite people anywhere.
0:34.2	And he has this extraordinary new book, Volga Blues, a journey into the heart of Russia.
0:38.7	I'm very interested in Russia. I probably would not have read this book if it weren't for the
0:43.4	fact that it was written by my friend, but I'm so glad that I read it. It's a splendid book.
0:48.7	What he does with a friend of his, a cinematographer and photographer, is start at the source of the Volga. Volga is the heart of
0:56.1	Russia. It's the soul of Russia in a way that the Mississippi even isn't the soul of America.
1:01.7	And they don't float it. They drive with guides, Katya and Vlad, all the way from the source
1:09.7	to the mouth on the Caspian Sea, stopping at important places
1:12.6	along the way. They are on an illegal reporting mission. In other words, they made no attempt to
1:20.1	get credentialed by the Russian ministry. They came as tourists, but of course they were there to report,
1:27.7	and they had a few scrapes, none of them too serious, but you get a sense that they were
1:32.1	living on borrowed time towards the end when they finally left the country.
1:37.7	It's an amazing book.
1:39.4	Most of what I know about the Russian soul I know from this book, much more than, than say from Tolstoy or Dostoevsky
1:47.0	because that's the 19th century Marzio is truly gifted he won a huge award in 2023 in
1:53.2	Europe for his reporting on the Russian Arctic the location he believes of the third world, which is already in some respects underway.
2:03.6	It's a splendid piece of work.
2:05.6	He has a great sense of humor, deep insights.
2:09.6	And here are just a few of them.
2:11.6	Number one, Russia regards the West, NATO, Europe, and the U.S. as the aggressor, and that their war in Ukraine is
	...

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