More Advance Praise for Lawrence Scott Sheets’s
EIGHT PIECES OF EMPIRE
“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 Shaman’s 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 Sheets’s gripping, intelligent, and compassionate account of the years following the Soviet empire’s 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 this page (© Steve Raymer/CORBIS);
photograph of Kelbajar helicopter field on this page (© 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 Union—History—1985–1991. 2. Russia (Federation)—History—1991. 3. Social change—Soviet Union—History. 4. Social change—Russia (Federation)—History. 5. Post-communism—Social aspects—Soviet Union—History. 6. Post-communism—Social aspects—Russia (Federation)—History. 7. Sheets, Lawrence Scott—Travel—Soviet Union. 8. Sheets, Lawrence Scott—Travel—Russia (Federation). 9. Soviet Union—Description and travel. 10. Russia (Federation)—Description and travel. I. Title.
DK286.S44 2011
947.085′3—dc23
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 (1909–2008)
(“I’m 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 (1935–1985)
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Legal Note
Author’s Note
PART I
FAREWELL LENINGRAD, FAREWELL EMPIRE
(1989-1991)
A Civil War Outside My Door
Our Communal
Tears of a KGB Man
A Bigamist Bandit and a Button Maker
Sickle and Hammer Down: An Empire’s Last Hours
PART II
GEORGIA: ANARCHY IN PARADISE (1992-1996)
Nobody Started This War
Exodus
Buried Five Times: Insurgents in Flat Black Nylons
A Word About War
PART III
AZERBAIJAN AND ARMENIA AT WAR (1993-1996)
Azerbaijan: Lifesaving Carpets
Armenia: A Faded Tintype of Mount Ararat
Azerbaijan: The Shish Kebab War and Eastern Democracy
PART IV
CHECHNYA: ECHOES OF THE DEPORTATION (1993-2004)
Grenade, Lightly Tossed
Grozny
Three Libertine Sabotage Women
A Disappearance
Three Boys Seeking Martyrdom
PART V
RESURRECTIONS: THE ABDICATION OF ATHEISM (1998-2005)
A Nameless Bunch of Bones
A KGB Church and Latter-day Saints
PART VI
CENTRAL ASIA: RISE OF THE RED SULTANS (2001-2002)
Uzbekistan: I Cannot Answer That Question
An Afghan Interlude
The Island of Dr. Moreau
PART VII
REVOLUTIONS, REINDEER, AND RADIATION (2003-2011)
The Flaming Recliner
Last Song of the Ultas
Home, Sweet Chernobyl
The Road to the Schoolhouse
PART VIII
AN EMPIRE EPILOGUE
Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography
About the Author
LEGAL NOTE
In 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 book’s narrative. In a few cases, namely the first part of the book (part I), 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 part II 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 part III; and Galina Nizhelskaya, my friend who disappeared in Chechnya, in part IV.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Those 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 down—in ways bad and good—by 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 correct—this is, of course, a book about an empire’s 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 Georgia’s 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 is—for me—the only way to tell this story.
I observed the USSR’s disintegration and its aftermath over roughly two decades. I was a student of the Russian language (in now again St. Petersburg) in 1987. I spent months in 1989 and 1990 as an interpreter and independent student in that city. In 1991, I arrived in Moscow as the empire entered the last months of its existence.
After 1991, I never really left the former Soviet Union again. I was bureau chief for Reuters in the turbulent Caucasus region of the former USSR from 1992 to 2000, and then worked for NPR (National Public Radio) from 2001 to 2008, including four years as NPR’s Moscow bureau chief.
My early experiences in the late 1980s through nearly the end of 1991 allowed me the rare gift of immersing myself in the day-to-day life of the imploding empire. I lived it before I ever reported on it.
Even as a journalist, I was given a rich vantage point from which to view events: Being based for several years as a full-time correspondent in the Caucasus Mountains—the scene of violent conflicts in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Chechnya—freed me from much of the desk work and press conference–laden reporting that one encounters as a Moscow-based staff reporter. The dissolution of the Soviet Union took place among the spiral arms and fringes to which it was attached: in this case, now-former Soviet republics and far-flung parts of Russia itself. Conflicts erupted that few have heard of—such as those between the ethnic Ingush and Ossetians. New police states in Central Asian places like Uzbekistan emerged. Then there was the post-9/11 American war in Afghanistan, itself often called “The Graveyard of Empires.” The miserable Soviet experience there helped lead to the USSR’s demise.
As we mark twenty years of the empire’s collapse, few speak about the USSR anymore or of what became of it. Westerners viewed it as a monolith. We largely failed to predict its demise—an object lesson about the ephemeral and perhaps our own sense of mortality, as nations and as human beings.
Aerial view of the Petrogradskaya Storona neighborhood of St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), Russia, in June 1990. The yellow cupolas of St. Vladimir’s Cathedral are visible (lower left) and directly across (lower center) is the building housing the communal apartment where the author spent the summer of 1989 as the USSR began to disintegrate.
In 1989, most Western Kremlinologists were still giddy with Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and his “reform” package to cure the ills of the Soviet Union. Known as “Glasnost and Perestroika” (“openness and restructuring”), the program was designed to bring the “Evil Empire” in from the cold (as it were). The prevailing view among the Western Kremlin watchers was that the Soviet Union was not destined for total collapse. Even after the end of that year, as Communist regimes in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, East Germany, Romania, Poland, and even Maoist Albania had either fallen or were teetering, this view of the USSR as re-formable remained intact.
It was not just “Kremlinologists” who got it wrong. The notion of the Soviet Union going belly-up was incomprehensible to many Westerners. Empire is a seductive concept—reassuring, monolithic, predictable, and comforting—and we Americans (and they, the “Soviets”) had cuddled up to the idea for about seven decades. During school drills, we’d huddled in fallout shelters with the telltale nuclear symbol, imagining our “foes” engaging in the same, predictable rite.
Waking up to find the Soviet Union gone was too mind-boggling to contemplate. If the society of our archenemy of the Cold War, the one we spent generations fearing, could collapse with such ease, what did that suggest about our own assumed immortality? Could not our American “empire” at some time unravel just as unexpectedly?
Those around me—in a once-posh but by then rundown Petrograd neighborhood—paid little attention to Gorbachev’s long-winded speeches on state television. Some didn’t care; others were oblivious. Most people were just too busy eking out a living. Yet in hindsight the empire’s days were clearly numbered.
A CIVIL WAR OUTSIDE MY DOOR
I look though the smoky-colored windows of our communal apartment, toward St. Vladimir’s Cathedral and its saffron-colored exterior. The empire is unraveling, and below, there are signs of the creeping chaos.
The scene around the cathedral is a source of practical information. Combatants converge around St. Vladimir’s—on one side are the growing flocks of worshippers—on the other, the growing groups of drunks, whose numbers surge over the summer, proof that yet another Communist Party effort (spearheaded by Gorbachev himself) to battle Russians’ love of the bottle is running dry. The image of drinking and of Russia may indeed be a Western stereotype. In fact, half the population imbibes little, if at all. Yet the drunks are there, right before my eyes.
The drunks favor the area for a simple reason: Out of spite or ignorance, the city authorities opened a skid row beer stand, or pivnushka (which in the official hierarchy of the Leningrad Municipal Department of Public Eating Places is literally at the bottom of the barrel—restaurants, cafés, and cafeterias rank higher), right next to St. Vladimir’s, a cathedral sheltering one of Orthodoxy’s most sacred icons.
Announced with a sloppily painted sign reading pivo (“beer”), the pivnushka is just an open-air shack. There’s no pretense here. The patrons, mostly bleary-eyed men who’ve seen better days, line up to get smashed—quickly and cheaply. Warm, brackish-tasting tap beer is poured into scratched-up mugs and passed into trembling hands.
By noon, drunken men are all around the beer stand. They spill into the street around St. Vladimir’s and into its courtyard. They pass out on benches. They wave their drinking glasses. They spit, they shout.
Then the skirmishes commence—the pious, most of them women, scatter the drunks away from St. Vladimir’s with raised hands, swinging purses. Many might be described as “babushkas.” But “babushka” is another Western caricature—a balloon-cheeked granny in a multicolored scarf. These women are of all descriptions: gaunt, urban matrons with birdlike arms; college girls; wobbly, roly-poly peasant mothers, some of them with their grandchildren in tow to teach them to know their icons. This is new and daring. Two years previously, such catechism exposed oneself to the prying eyes of potentially informer priests.
The Saints usually win these daily conflagrations. With sweat popping off their foreheads, the Sinners retreat to their rear base down Talalikhina Lane near the pivnushka.
And in reality, both sides are winners, are they not?
For both, freedom has indeed been found! For the Saints, who now worship in public without looking over their shoulders. And for the drunks, who indeed would have been rounded up as parasites or miscreants jus
t a few years back. They stand around, drinking and laughing and shouting in animated if inebriated conversation, oblivious to the robed priests and head-scarved women entering St. Vladimir’s Cathedral, ironically in this year of 1989, the two hundredth anniversary of its consecration.
Yet to others, that freedom, the empire’s demise, is a symbol of the impending anarchy, unpredictable and threatening.
A FEW STEPS separate St. Vladimir’s Cathedral from our building’s entrance at Talalikhina Lane 7/9.
Nina Nikolaevna and I pass through the entranceway, she making a deliberate attempt to ignore the loitering drunks. We slowly ascend to the fifth and final floor of the dark, winding staircase, stopping on almost every landing. Her legs are riddled with gout, victims of the World War II Nazi blockade of the city, which killed nearly a million Leningraders—and barely spared Nina’s life.
Our corner of the communal is the first room on the right. Privacy is a piece of cloth hung over a rope drawn across the middle. Nina Nikolaevna’s bed occupies a sacred corner—the sheet of fabric serving as room divider is almost never pulled all the way back. I sleep on a small, hard divan near the door.
There is a black-and-white television set, a small table, a bookshelf. The tablecloth is pristine, the floor swept and scrubbed to a gloss. This is the inner sanctum, away from the shabby common areas in the hallway, toilet, and kitchen.
A ubiquitous “people’s radio” is bolted to the wall, obligatory in any Soviet flat. It offers no choice of frequencies—just buttons to push for three government radio stations.
Interspersed with music, announcers read ominous-sounding Communist Party bulletins. The ring though the tinny speaker consists of stern warnings to the leaders of independence from the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia who are already well on their way to seceding from the USSR.
NINA NIKOLAEVNA is sturdily built, with a wisp of grayish-white hair and warm but steely eyes that hint of a long, hard life. She makes the trip up and down the deep stairway several times a day on those gimpy legs. She might, one could presume, because of the exile of her daughter, or the hyperinflation devouring her pension, have less reason to defend the system than many other people. But that is not the case.
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