Lawrence Scott Sheets - Eight Pieces of Empire: A 20-Year Journey Through the Soviet Collapse

Dean of the Moscow press corps Lawrence Scott Sheets has been everywhere and seen it all. Funny, engaged, and humane, he is a matchless guide to the tattered remnants of the Soviet empire.

Anna Reid, author of Borderland and The Shamans Coat

A smoothly written and sensitively drawn personal portrait of the people and places Lawrence Sheets meets during the roiling collapse of the Soviet Union, and the furtive, now two-decade-long struggle of the resulting fifteen states to construct something new. I have the feeling that people will be reading his account for a long time to come.

Steve LeVine, contributing editor at Foreign Policy and adjunct professor, Security Studies Program, Georgetown University

Beautifully wrought and executed with admirable clarity, Lawrence Sheetss gripping, intelligent, and compassionate account of the years following the Soviet empires end is a must-read for anyone interested in the human cost of change.

Vanora Bennett, journalist and author of Portrait of an Unknown Woman and The Taste of Dreams

During his almost two decades living and reporting in several countries that are former Soviet Republics, Lawrence Sheets had a front-row seat to the human casualties and political fallout of the collapse of the Soviet empire. Eight Pieces of Empire vividly captures the lived experiences of people caught on the sweeping waves of politics and history with intimacy and insight.

Robin Hessman, director/producer of My Perestroika

Copyright 2011 by Lawrence Scott Sheets

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

All photographs in this work are by the author, with the exception of the following:
photograph of Leningrad on ( Steve Raymer/CORBIS);
photograph of Kelbajar helicopter field on ( Thomas Goltz).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sheets, Lawrence Scott.
Eight pieces of empire : a 20-year journey through the Soviet collapse / Lawrence Scott Sheets. 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Soviet UnionHistory19851991. 2. Russia (Federation)History1991. 3. Social changeSoviet UnionHistory. 4. Social changeRussia (Federation)History. 5. Post-communismSocial aspectsSoviet UnionHistory. 6. Post-communismSocial aspectsRussia (Federation)History. 7. Sheets, Lawrence ScottTravelSoviet Union. 8. Sheets, Lawrence ScottTravelRussia (Federation). 9. Soviet UnionDescription and travel. 10. Russia (Federation)Description and travel. I. Title.
DK286.S44 2011
947.0853dc23

2011023849

eISBN: 978-0-307-88885-3

Map by Hadel Studio
Jacket design by Ben Gibson
Jacket photography Harald Sund/Getty Images

v3.1

Dedicated to my grandmother
Helen Elizabeth Burlingame Groh (19092008)
(Im not going to sit around waiting to age 102
to read that manuscript!you kept your promise on that,
but you came close)
and my mother,
Joyce Arden Groh Sheets (19351985)

I n writing this book , I have relied chiefly on the nearly two thousand print and radio stories I filed over this period, as well as full notes and audio recordings taken over the roughly two decades of the books narrative. In a few cases, namely the first part of the book (), I also relied on reconstructed memory, often with the help of people such as the former exiles Viktor and Mila; Pavel-the-once-Leningrad-button-maker; Ivan the journalist from Chechnya; Irina Mikhailova, formerly my producer at NPR Moscow; Zhorra Vardzelashvili, now a ghostwriter of novels in Georgia; and others to ensure accuracy.

The vast majority of the names of the individuals described are their actual legal names. In a few cases, however, I have omitted surnames at the request of my subjects. I have used pseudonyms for some first names at the specific requests of the persons in question and in reponse to their concerns for their own personal or family safety in some of the more insecure areas of the former USSR. I have not, however, employed pseudonyms to replace legal surnames. Nor have any persons of any major political or public profile been given a pseudonym; their names, surnames, and political or other profiles are stated as correct.

In a few other cases, I have made the decision to omit surnames or change the first names of my subjects; in these cases, the reasons are because I am no longer in touch with the individuals described and my efforts to find them have not borne fruit. In the event that any of these individuals are still alive, I wish to protect their identities, wherever they are today.

As for a few nicknames employed, most often these were not people I would have been asking for political information or other quotable advice, and in almost all these cases our interaction was fleeting. For example, the Preacher Man in was someone I found wandering around Abkhazia, and that is how we (journalists there at the time) referred to him, rather than by his given name.

Of the many colleagues or acquaintances whose fates sadly ended prematurely, I have not changed any first names or surnames. Included among these are: my friend and colleague the late journalist Adil Bunyatov in .

T hose who read parts of this book before publication had vastly different feelings about its essential message. One friend described it as a book about outcasts. Existences were tossed upside downin ways bad and goodby the Soviet collapse. Far-flung parts of the Soviet Empire struggled to find their own identities. Another reader called it a book about death.

I think both are correctthis is, of course, a book about an empires death.

It is also about many of those who died as it fragmented violently in an extended, continuing process. I deliberately describe a variety of vignettes: a Russian acquaintance slipping into the world of extortion as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics dissolved; a dissident poet locked away for years in prison in Uzbekistan; some of the flamboyant personalities involved in Georgias armed conflicts of the early 1990s.

One might wonder how these various stories are related. The answer is that empires do not break down along nice clean lines. They fragment, and the dissolution of the USSR and of the personal lives and explosive situations affected by its fragmentation is the very subject of this book. The demise of such a monolith comes along with extraordinary rarity and produces completely unpredictable consequences. The Soviet Union was like an ill-fitting stained-glass mosaic, unsustainable and destined to shatter. Picking up and examining a few of those fragments isfor methe only way to tell this story.