As the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Rory MacLean travelled from Berlin to Moscow; 30 years on, MacLean traces his original journey backwards, across countries confronting old ghosts and new fears: from Russia, through Ukraine, into Hungary, Poland, Germany, and the U.K. In incidents surreal but true, he shoulders an AK-47 to go hunting with Moscow's chicken tsar, plays video games in St. Petersburg with a hacker who cracked the U.S. election, drops by the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership in a nowhereland, and waits patiently to chat with Mikhail Gorbachev. Along the way, MacLean asks what happened to the optimism of 1989 and, in the shadow of Brexit, chronicles the collapse of the European dream.