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Former NPR journalist, MSU grad chronicles Soviet collapse

By Kevin Lavery, WKAR News

http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wkar/local-wkar-993946.mp3

East Lansing, MI – Twenty years ago, then-president Mikhail Gorbachev made a stunning announcement: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formally dissolved. The Soviet empire - America's ally in World War II and its adversary in the Cold War - was no more. The breakdown severed the communist monolith into a string of fledgling independent republics.

Lawrence Sheets spent 20 years covering the former USSR...four of those as NPR's Moscow bureau chief. The East Lansing native and Michigan State University graduate details his experience his new book,"Eight Pieces of Empire."

LAWRENCE SHEETS: There was no grand formula to it all. I wish I could tell you that there was some sort of theory to it, but I actually started thinking about the things which had left the biggest impressions on me, and I began writing down vignettes. Some of them were in war zones; in Georgia, Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Armenia. And one just led to another.

And then I started trying to organize these vignettes into some sort of cohesive pattern. I ended up sewing them together both chronologically and in some places thematically. One of the sections deals with religion in the former Soviet Union and specifically Russia. Most of the other chapters are, as I said, geographic arrangements.

KEVIN LAVERY: Christmas 1991, the Kremlin makes an announcement that you detail in your book about the Soviet Union itself being dissolved. Did the Kremlin have any sort of a plan for some kind of a transitional government for all its republics? I think some of us in the West may have had this naive sense that democracy would just naturally rush in to fill the void.

SHEETS: Yes, that's absolutely the case. I think that it caught ordinary people in the Soviet Union unawares, and it also caught Western policymakers and analysts unawares; no question about that. There really wasn't a planned transition. (Former Soviet president Mikhail) Gorbachev was meeting with the leaders of the union republics, but he had a very bad relationship with Boris Yeltsin, who was by then the president of the Russian Federation which was still nominally part of the Soviet Union.

It wasn't until very late in the game - November and December 1991 - that the Soviet Union, the U.S.S.R. central bank essentially ran out of money completely. It wasn't until December that Boris Yeltsin, along with the leaders of two other republics - Belarus and Kazakhstan - signed an agreement forming not a new union, but a loose association of former Soviet republics. Gorbachev was left as a president without a country, essentially.

It was actually very interesting, because being there on December 25, 1991, I don't think people that grasped the significance of what was happening. It was such a psychological shift, not only for Russians, but for policymakers in the West that they somehow figured there would be some sort of reformed union called the Commonwealth of Independent States. And it didn't dawn on anyone, I think, for quite a while...it was a gradual process, that the empire had dissolved.

LAVERY: There's a passage early in the book that I think speaks to the older population's sense of this monolithic entity of the Soviet Union. It's 1989, you're living in Leningrad, there's an elderly woman there in the communal apartments where you lived named Nina Nikolaevna. She had been a teenager in World War II and she had survived the horrific Nazi blockade of Leningrad. Nina is living in the basement of St. Issac's Cathedral because of the blockade, and like many people in Leningrad is starving. And there's this interesting episode where her life is spared because a very unlikely food has come to her door. And I'd like for you to read a passage about Nina.

SHEETS: "A family friend knew one of the zookeepers. A hunk of the seal blubber would be Nina's: the difference between life and death. More than 45 years after the end of the blockade, Nina describes the sensation fully, as if the taste of seal blubber is returning to her parched lips and tongue. She describes how a man, a family acquaintance, slipped into the basement of St. Issac's Cathedral and handed the chunk of seal fat to her mother, who gently placed it in Nina's mouth.

Nina chewed the fatty seal blubber slowly in that basement room stuffed with icons, washing it down with a bit of sawdust, bread and rainwater - waiting for the magic effect to set in, drug-like, until the next day, the swelling in her legs began to ease. She gradually got up and stood on her own two feet again.

In Nina's own eyes, the empire is also responsible for great feats. For her, the empire itself was the mysterious hand that put the precious piece of seal blubber to her lips during the starvation of the Leningrad blockade...giving her a second lease on life."

LAVERY: Nina looks upon the Soviet Union's collapse 50-some years later as just utterly inconceivable!

SHEETS: Yes, I think to her it was. Even though she was not a (Communist) party member; she was not a Stalinist. She certainly, though, like many Russians, could not comprehend the world without the Soviet Union. And for someone who'd lived through experiences like the Leningrad blockade, when the Soviet Union, along with its Western allies, emerged victorious but very badly damaged by World War II; I think for someone who attributed victory to the existence of the Soviet empire, and to imagine your country being humbled and falling apart; it just flies in the face of everything you've been told, even if what you believed wasn't necessarily exactly what you'd been told.

LAVERY: As your readers pick up "Eight Pieces of Empire" for themselves, what common themes or patterns do you think they will find among of all of the peoples and the conflicts that you talk about?

SHEETS: I think you find confusion. Sometimes it's a good confusion, and people have been able to pick up the pieces and construct wholly new lives and were genuinely very happy that the Soviet Union dissolved. In other cases, people became shipwrecked, they lost their identity; especially if they were people who believed more in the system. So I think confusion, chaos, absurdity...quite often those are common themes in the book.

LAVERY: What is promising now in those republics? Why should the West continue to invest and care about what's happening there?

SHEETS: There are very promising places in terms of the intellect which was built up over years and years. For the most part, the education system; basic education system in those countries was fairly good. They have high rates of literacy, generally. A hard working population, which has been, although it was under Soviet rule for so long, still has a fairly Western orientation; social orientation. Tremendous resources and potential sources of wealth, and as I said, human capital. And (it has) very interesting cultures which have still not fully been exposed to the West.

We still don't know as much about these countries as we would have had they not been part of the Soviet Union and been subsumed into this monolith. We knew very little about these republics. We did not necessarily know that these were places with absolutely different mentalities. So, I think even though it's been 20 years, it's still relatively virgin territory.

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