Free Eight Pieces of Empire by Lawrence Scott Sheets

the stairwell and knocked on the door. A man pried it open just enough for me to see inside. He didn’t have to ask who I was looking for.
    “They’re all gone,” he said with a sigh of relief, shutting the door quickly. I made some phone calls, trying to find Lena or Vova through a network of acquaintances, their numbers scribbled on a slip of paper. No one knew where they had gone. As for Ellie, I had no idea where to look for her.
    I rang Vova’s parents’ telephone number. His sister answered the phone. She recognized my voice and accent. But there was silence on the other end when I asked for Vova. I asked again if he was there.
    “No,” came the belated reply.
    “Do you know when he’ll be back?” I asked.
    “No,” was the response after an even longer, more awkward pause.
    “OK, do you know where I can get ahold of him?”
    “No,” said the female voice. Then she hung up the phone.
    I wondered where to look, or if to, and whether a prison—or a graveyard—might be the best place to start.

SICKLE AND HAMMER DOWN: AN EMPIRE’S LAST HOURS
    T he date was Wednesday , December 25, 1991. It was Christmas Day in much of the world, but in Orthodox Russia, just another day. Except it would turn out to be the USSR’s last. I had come to Moscow two months earlier with thoughts of pursuing foreign correspondence. I grabbed a cab and headed out in search of some groceries.
    “Under Brezhnev there was even cocoa in the stores, God damn it!” The taxi driver slapped his hand on the wheel of his Volga four-door. “Even fucking cocoa!” He laughed uncontrollably through his gold teeth, as if the very idea of cocoa sitting on a store shelf evoked wonder. “Look what they’ve done. Gorbachev and his cronies have destroyed a great country. Everyone feared us. Now I don’t think even Upper Volta is afraid of Russia.”
    Gorby had still hung on as one by one every last one of the fifteen so-called titular republics that made up the USSR declared independence and sovereignty from the center outward: Armenia, Azerbaijan … Kazakhstan … Kyrgyzstan … and when Russia declared itself free and independent of the “Soyuz” (Union), Mikhail Gorbachev had effectively become a president without a country.
    But when his nemesis, Boris Yeltsin, now president of the reborn Russian Federation, led the effort to cobble together a post-Soviet entity called the “Commonwealth of Independent States,” known by its clumsy-sounding acronym CIS (SNG in Russian), it was all over. Many Russiansstill had no firm idea as to whether the USSR (SSSR in Russian) still formally existed. The hammer-and-sickle flag was still flying, after all.
    “Can you tell what this SNG thing means?” asked the gold-toothed taxi driver as I got out of his car. “SSSR (USSR) sounded a hell of a lot better.” He slammed the door behind me.
    While I scurried around town looking for supplies, Mikhail Gorbachev was spending his last day in power behind the massive red walls of the Kremlin. He’d been under a virtual news blackout about his fate, but not of the nefarious kind. None of the Soviet television networks was even documenting the last days of the empire, because none of them seemed to care. By contrast, some foreign networks spent days in the corridors of fading power, recording everything now that the once-feared foreigners had easy access to the nerve center of the erstwhile Evil Empire. The irony was not lost on Gorbachev’s closest aides.
    “It’s shameful for us that only Western TV journalists hovered around him,” wrote Anatoly Chernayev in his account of Gorbachev’s final days in power.
    While I was at the market “Christmas shopping” for bread and cheap sausage that morning, Gorbachev asked to have a telephone call arranged with US president George Herbert Walker Bush, during which Gorbachev informed Bush that he would be making a special televised address at seven p.m. Moscow time. He also told Bush that he had signed an