Eight Pieces of Empire: A 20-Year Journey Through the Soviet Collapse

by Lawrence Scott Sheets

Overview

“[An] unforgettable memoir” (Boston Globe) that provides a window into the wildly divergent nations that once comprised the Soviet Union, from a former NPR reporter
 
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, Lawrence Scott Sheets lived and reported from the former USSR and saw firsthand the reverberations of the empire’s collapse, through the rise of Vladimir Putin in the new Russia. 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, a defiant resident of the Chernobyl exclusion zone in Ukraine, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307888853
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/01/2011
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	872,223
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Lawrence Scott Sheets reported for National Public Radio for seven years and was NPR’s Moscow bureau chief from 2001-2005, covering the entire former USSR. He was Caucasus region bureau chief for Reuters from 1992-2000 and a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University from 2000-2001. He also worked for NBC News in Moscow during 1992 and his work has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, and heard on the BBC World Service, Public Radio International, and other news outlets. Sheets is currently South Caucasus Project Director of the International Crisis Group, focusing on Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

Eight Pieces of Empire is a unique, readable, and bracing work of eyewitness history by a brave foreign correspondent who risked his safety and more to document it.”—The New Republic

“Lawrence Sheets is a foreign correspondent whose bravery exceeds one’s comprehension. . . . He has produced some of the most gripping war correspondence I have ever read.”—The Washington Times

“Unforgettable memoir and travelogue of a period and a place most of us would prefer to forget . . . [gives] meaning, and perspective, to the rocky transition of the past two decades, and infuses it with drama and despair . . . vital and vivid.”—The Boston Globe

“An invaluable eyewitness account of the traumas of the Soviet collapse told through the lives of those who were caught up in it and often buried under it. The book is written with a disarming honesty, sympathy and humility.”—The Economist

“A vivid, largely anecdotal account of the chaos and confusion that has followed in the two decades since the fall of the massive communist entity that once obsessed America. It leaves the reader hungry for more.”—Associated Press

“Sheets’ suite of incidents bespeaks his Russian-fluent immersion among people unmoored by the Soviet collapse, a quality watchers of the Russian scene will appreciate.”—Booklist

“In an era when the media establishment supports foreign reporting less and less, Lawrence Sheets has lived a life of utter seriousness as a foreign correspondent: concentrating on one broad area—the former Soviet Union—in order to develop subject expertise, and then dedicating himself to indefatigable ground-level coverage of that area. Forget the pundits and the scandalmongers, this is a real journalist.”—Robert D. Kaplan, author of The Good American

“Few Westerners understand the post-Soviet soul like Lawrence Sheets. Whether it is his hair-raising stories of the region’s myriad armed conflicts or the black humor with which he captures the moral and physical impoverishment of a collapsing empire, Sheets brilliantly condenses twenty tumultuous years into an eminently readable tale."—Matthew Brzezinski, author of Red Moon Rising

“To capture the human cost of fallen empire with all its horror and absurdity, Sheets offers the right combination: the political insight of a top reporter and the power of a novelist.”—Martin Cruz Smith, author of Gorky Park and other books

“With Eight Pieces of Empire, Lawrence Scott Sheets brings a journalist’s watchful eye, an essayist’s sense of humor, and a scholar’s mind to the legacy of Soviet empire in all its color and complexity. This book is a great read, and its images linger in the mind long after the cover is closed.”—Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group and author of The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?

“This may read like a mad journey through some of the most dangerous places on earth, but it is much more than that as well. Sheets witnessed most of the wars, disasters, and revolutions that followed the end of communism, and his accounts of them—from Chechnya to Chernobyl, and from Abkhazia to Afghanistan—serve as a passionate but considered obituary for the vanished Soviet empire.”—Oliver Bullough, author of Let Our Fame Be Great

“War reporter Lawrence Sheets’s edgy memoir evokes exactly the fatalism, confusion, and centrifugal forces that suddenly broke up the Soviet Union two decades ago. Refreshingly free of faraway theorizing, this book focuses on what people actually saw and experienced in those years.”—Hugh Pope, author of Dining with al-Qaeda

“Dean of the Moscow press corps Lawrence Scott Sheets has been everywhere and seen it all. Funny, engaged, and humane, he is a matchless guide to the tattered remnants of the Soviet empire.”—Anna Reid, author of Borderland and The Shaman’s Coat

From the Publisher

Sheets (former Moscow bureau chief, NPR) writes candidly about eight nations with past connections to the Soviet Union and his personal experiences as a war correspondent in, e.g., Ossetia, Georgia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan. Sheets's experience gives him a singular perspective on many of the conflicts those in the West remember now as vague historical footnotes. His matter-of-fact style never becomes overly political; when he includes his own commentary, he does so in a reserved and rational manner. Sheets details his numerous dangerous encounters with a calm that belies the risk but always draws personal connections to the people affected the most by the events he chronicled. VERDICT Journalism students and professors, readers interested in the recent history of a region struggling to redefine itself, or anyone who has ever listened to a war correspondent's reports with fascination will find Sheets's new memoir engrossing.—Elizabeth Zeitz, Otterbein Univ. Lib., Westerville, OH

Library Journal

Prosaic travels through the rubble of the Soviet Empire. Former NPR Moscow bureau chief Sheets has been a longtime resident of Russia, having arrived there as a student in the late 1980s and been privileged to see firsthand the reforms of the Gorbachev era and, soon thereafter, the collapse of the Soviet Union. As he writes here, not everyone in Russia or its former satellites was glad to see the Soviets go. One old survivor of the siege of Leningrad, for instance, faults current leader Vladimir Putin, a former KGB stalwart, for not being tough enough, even if he "had made Russia respected in the world again--if not an empire, then certainly a country to be taken seriously." Sheets travels through several post-Soviet landscapes, observing the war Chechnya as it was unfolding; he adds value to other accounts by being able to speak directly to the combatants in conversations that highlight, among other things, racism in the ranks. There are some revealing moments, as when former statesman Edvard Shevardnadze admits that he had not correctly foreseen the events that would sweep the Soviet state from power ("I was convinced the Soviet Union would disintegrate," he says. "But to be honest, I was off by 10 or 15 years"), and when Sheets travels into the "Stans," which he calls "some of the most quirky countries of earth." The author's accounts are evenhanded and trustworthy, but his prose limps along, pausing to remark on too man obvious points. Less of the expected nostrums and more on the gritty business of collecting news in dangerous places would have helped. A latecomer to the field, not strong enough to displace better books that cover the same ground, such as Marq de Villiers' Down the Volga (1992), Thomas Goltz's Chechnya Diary (2003) and Andrew Jack's Inside Putin's Russia (2004).

Kirkus Reviews