Eight Pieces of Empire

Not with a bang, but with a quiet, ten-minute address on Christmas Day, 1991: this is how the Soviet Union met its end. But in the wake of that one deceptively calm moment, conflict and violence soon followed. Some of the emergent new countries began to shed totalitarianism while other sought to revive their own dead empires or were led by ex-Soviet leaders who built equally or even more repressive political machines. Since the late 1980s, Sheets lived and reported from the former USSR and saw firsthand the reverberations of the empire's collapse. Eight Pieces of Empire draws readers into the people, politics and day-to-day life, painting a vivid portrait of a tumultuous time. Sheets' stories about people living through these tectonic shifts of fortune-a trio of female saboteurs in Chechnya, the chaos of newly independent Georgia in the early 1990s, young hustlers eager to strike it rich in the post-Soviet economic vacuum-reveal the underreported and surprising ways in which the ghosts of empire still haunt these lands and the world. Inhaltsverzeichnis Contents for Eight Pieces of Empire (Broadway Paperbacks)   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