Eight Pieces of Empire: A 20-Year Journey Through the Soviet Collapse in Around the World in 80 Books

Nov 15, 2011 Tony rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

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 fr 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. ...more

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Dec 09, 2012 Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance rated it really liked it

Shelves: nonfiction, history

We heard about the USSR every scary day of my young life and then, suddenly, it was gone. Out of the news. Poof. Threat vanished and nobody in America is interested any more in that part of the world.

Or so the Powers That Be seemed to think. Not Lawrence Scott Sheets. He was out there, dodging bullets in the local wars that flared up all over the former USSR after its demise, and visiting with the locals, and just looking around at the new world that was emerging out of the chaos.

This book is a ...more

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