WHILE ZHANNA WAS STRUGGLING to accept the cars and roast piglets, Seryozha had woken up one day to their absence. His grandfather still led a political party, still served on commissions—but in 1991, along with the entire Gorbachev establishment, he was rendered irrelevant to the machinery that ran the country. Seryozha’s parents divorced that year. His father moved out. Everything was different now.
