Eight Pieces of Empire: A 20-Year Journey Through the Soviet Collapse [ハードカバー]

There is a reluctance to pick up yet another book about the end of the USSR, about the consequent civil wars and economic hardships. Why relive those times again so soon? The events hardly seem to have fallen off the edge of the present and into the past. Certainly we don't need another retrospective historical survey.

Yet 8 Pieces is not that sort of book. Sheets offers a far more personal, intimate account. It is also not a rehashing of stories he did as a Reuters or NPR reporter. Instead, it is a journey behind the faade of his work output, to meet the people and places where he lived and traveled for a decade and a half, gathering the stories of imperial fallout.

Sheets' sympathetic and often tragic account begins with some fun, self-deprecating episodes as a young student of Russian coping in a Petersburg kommunalka, but soon we are witnessing the USSR's swift and nearly silent end, like steam whooshing out an opened door. And then we accompany Sheets to cover the wars in Chechnya and Georgia, the ethnic strife in Central Asia, in which he provides a profoundly revealing picture of what it takes - in blood and sweat - to deliver those 90 second bits of reportage we hear on the evening news.

Sheets takes readers on a journey filled with colorful characters, from budding young criminals to fearless photographers, with stories that range from vivid, nerve-wracking stories of war reporting, to more sedate, cerebral stories on things like the Romanov bones and the Ulta people on Sakhalin. The ride is not always pleasant, and the stories are often not those you would want to read before bedtime, but on the whole this is a profoundly important memoir and one that needs to be read by anyone seeking to understand what the end of the USSR really meant for those living there.

As reviewed in Russian Life magazine.

When I declared my undergraduate major, one of the required courses I would have to take senior year was "Soviet Foreign Policy." However, by the time senior year rolled around, there was no more Soviet Union, and the course had been haphazardly reconstructed as a seminar given by two visiting professors from Moscow on the Commonwealth of Independent States. In this book, a journalist who covered Russia and the former Soviet republics in the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR provides a fragmentary glimpse into the collapse of the old and the birthing pains of the new. I say fragmentary because Sheets only writes about places and events he personally covered, and thankfully avoids attempting to patch together any master thesis out of his experience. Instead, what he provides are brief glimpses into corners of the fragmented remains of an empire and some of the many fragmented lives that resulted from that collapse.

His stories unfold chronologically, starting in Part 1 with his time as a language student in the late '80s (his fluent Russian is what led to his success as a journalist in the region), and the most vivid episode from this time is his friendship with one of the mafiya types that were just starting to bloom. From there, he moves on to discuss the calamitous war in Georgia and Abkhazia, then to the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, then Chechnya. These three parts on the Caucuses are a depressing litany of lost causes and warlords, chaos and civilian casualties. All of which have been covered in much greater detail in many other books, but Sheets' anecdotes and interludes provide a true "you are there" sense of the futility of it all, as well as a sense of the actual people on the ground. Part 5 is a brief peek into the return and normalization of Orthodox Christianity in post-Soviet Russia, but felt a bit incomplete -- I could have used some more on the topic of the reemergence of religion in Russia. Part 6 touches upon the Central Asian republics, with three items focusing on Uzbekistan, including a breathtaking account of the Battle of Qala-i-Jongi. Part 7 is a hodgepodge of pieces, including the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the fate of the indigenous Ulta people of Sakhalin Island, life in the restricted zone of Chernobyl, and a horrific account of the 2004 massacre at the Beslan school.

The book concludes with a very brief epilogue that provides some small measure of closure on Sheets own history with the remnants of USSR. Again, there is no large lesson to be learned from the book, just impressions and images of the chaos that emerges when an empire collapses. Those with an interest in, and prior exposure to the history of the Soviet Union and its component republics will find it an interesting set of vignettes, that lend depth and color to what they already knew, but it seems like a book that's unlikely to gain a wider audience.

In 1989, most Western Kremlinologists were excited by Gorbachev'ss reforms - Glasnost, Perestroika, and did not see the Soviet Union headed for total collapse. This optimism continued through the end of the year, despite Communist regimes in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, E. Germany, Romania, Poland, and Albania having fallen or teetering. Similarly, author Sheets points out Russia's survivors of Germany's invasion assumed the empire would survive again, just as it had then.

Anything that provides credible insight to either China or Russia is both interesting and valuable. The nearly 69-year-old Soviet Union collapsed quietly in a ten-minute address on Christmas Day, 1991. Author Sheets gives us the background on how that came about. Clue - it wasn't Reagan's 'Tear down this wall!' or military buildup. Sheets' detailing the reality of communal living provides a major piece of the answer, and its remarkably similar to reports of life at Mao's collective farms - they too failed, over ten years earlier. We also learn what happened in various areas after the U.S.S.R. collapse - another illustration that democracy is not a 'cure-all.' And finally, both China and Russia have become havens for blatant bribing of public officials - neither has learned America's sophisticated ways of doing and hiding the same thing.

At the time of the Soviet Union's collapse, author Sheets was living in a communal environment - one toilet, telephone, doorbell for all, four or more to a room (often sleeping in shifts), with little in the way of personal property other than some clothes, pans, towels, and a toilet seat for each family. Stalin was still respected - he won the war vs. Germany, there was food on the table then (except during the Nazi blockade), and 'we needed a bit of the Iron Hand.'

Those quick to criticize the former U.S.S.R., however, would do well to remember that it was Stalin et al who were the biggest causes of Hitler's defeat.

We also learn what happened in various areas after the U.S.S.R. collapse - and why Americans today are looked down upon as silly and naive. Everyone in Russia learned the hard way that a dollop of democracy, combined with Wild-West capitalism, was a recipe for economic disaster.

Twenty years later (2006), Sheets returned to that original communal setting in which he first lived in Russia. The only two individuals remaining did so because they wanted to - had lived there 40-some years, and didn't want to move, despite the opportunity. Putin was respected for restoring order, getting pension checks out to those entitled, restoring respect to Russia, and using its oil riches to benefit the population. Some however, thought he wasn't tough enough. Today Russia is still burdened by its 88 regions, dozens of languages and ethnicities, and especially Chechnya.